square white world

The problem of vision for Giacometti was to find the style which would most amply and truly embody it. That is the problem, of course, of all art, and it is the cruelest problem of all, for it tests the personal resources of the artist beyond the limit of his capacity. The expression of truth is an effect of style, and that pitiless fact only increases the difficulty of the search for a true style.

- photograph by Dong Wensheng, Meditating Head Sculpture from the Tranquilizing Room series

Alberto knew this. He once observed: “The truer a work of art is, the more it has style. Which is strange, because style is not the truth of appearances, and yet the heads which I find most like those of the people one sees in the street are the least realistic heads, the heads of Egyptian, Chinese, or archaic Greek sculpture. For me, the greatest inventiveness leads to the greatest likeness.”

- James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1997, p. 166

Below, to grow your viewing pleasure and to view my growing displeasure, please find a minimally edited copy of the exchange of comments ensuing from that already posted here in the preceding post. [link] Theatreview provided the venue for this unhappy episode, on the occasion of John Smythe’s review for Mary Stuart at Circa Theatre, entitled “WHY DO IT?.” [link] Indeed.

John Smythe:

Thank you Simon. I shall attempt to address the points I think you want answered.

“England-cum-Great Britain”: As I understand it, King James was the first monarch to declare himself “King of Great Brittaine” (as well as France and Ireland) in 1604, although England and Scotland remained separate countries with their own parliaments until 1707.

I have never said the only thing NZ theatre companies should produce is NZ work, just that is their core responsibility. Who else in the world should do it? And where in the world do those other plays come from if not from cultures (that word again) that create their own theatre as well as recreate that of others? In contributing to an international arts festival it seems especially appropriate to stage something homegrown – doesn’t it?

If that is “a facile agenda” then we might as well renounce any claim to distinction in either sense of the word, and resign ourselves to the ‘culture’ of a refugee camp or transit lounge. Do we really lack the root systems to contribute positively to the global ecology of theatre.

It is to our benefit that we are more aware of other cultures – English-speaking ones especially – than they are of us. No day passes without our hearing their voices though one medium or another. But we’re not prisoners in our own land. We have a voice too, the right and a responsibility to use it, and the failure to do so is wimpish and pathetic.

The live theatres that do ‘originals’ are a great deal more vital – in all senses of that word – than those which specialise in ‘covers’. My argument is that our better resourced companies (thanks to tax-payer funding) should either be leading the way, or building on the groundswell created by the creative co-ops whose often extraordinary works are celebrated on this website, or both. And I am claiming that Circa is especially lax in this regard. They don’t have a literary unit, or similar, and I would be interested to know how they go about keeping up with the new material coming through and factoring it into their considerations when developing their programme of productions.

Simon Taylor:

Thanks, John. That firms up your critique of Circa. I don’t think it does theatre any good to put the playwright at the centre of the debate regarding theatre’s cultural role. The play’s not the thing, certainly not a cultural thing, until it’s performed; as for a New Zealand play, what’s that?

Theatre companies should be asking this question as well as attempting to find answers to it. It appears to me that there is still insufficient critical input into this question, that it usually devolves to the level of sheer expediency, on the part of funding bodies, and the good intentions of strangers, and that your review adds nothing to this debate. That there are more NZ plays performed than ever before does not contribute a cultural value in itself; after all, there’s Thomas Sainsbury.

A literary or academic assumption underlies your view that NZ theatre companies ought to be obliged to produce NZ plays, what one might call the authorial preference, as much as something else far less appetising. A hint as to what this something else might be is given by Maryanne Cathro in a review also available on this site (here), thus:

There are two adjectives describing shows I am beginning to dread as an audience goer: “devised” and “experimental”.

To which the only answer is the question: Where were you for the twentieth century? (Living in dread, as we all were, that the century would have to begin again, and again, and again.)

… then we might as well renounce any claim to distinction in either sense of the word, and resign ourselves to the ‘culture’ of a refugee camp or transit lounge. Do we really lack the root systems to contribute positively to the global ecology of theatre.

In a second we will grow the topic to include the sustainability of theatre, the luminous word-spores that pass from the playwright’s over- rather than inter-active screen too quickly to critique before they fill the stages with the vitality of homespun pastiches. Does every culture really need its great social-realist work? … again and again and again. Again and again, for each generation, for each immediate cultural context. Because? No history.

And yes, therefore renounce. To clarify: where can we look to find the history that we’ve lost by waging a cultural war on the institution of theatre in New Zealand? Because we won’t find it among the ‘many superb but neglected plays’ languishing on the shelves of Playmarket. Although, I concede that that would be a start.

To further clarify: the ‘transit lounge’ or ‘refugee camp’ culture to which we resign ourselves having renounced our deference to the bloodlines of the author refers to a sense of time rather than a sense of place.

But even repeating the sense of your sentence I find that same unappetising taste in my mouth: refugee camp? transit lounge? don’t they in turn refer to the catastrophe of history we are at present witnessing globally? the numbers forced into involuntary exile, dispossessed, refused entry…?

Where are the NZ plays bearing witness to what is happening on a world stage? or are those playwrights in turn forced into internal exile, dispossessed and refused entry, in a way which although kinder is no less decisive?

Corus:

Is SImon Taylor drunk?

Simon Taylor:

Not so as he cannot refrain from hitting the upper-case button. Nice of you to ask. Cheers.

David Murray:

The role of Theatre – including local theatre companies such as Circa Theatre is to entertain, to enlighten, and to educate.

[link]
[link]

How any particular troupe decides to do that – either by choosing to perform plays written by New Zealanders or plays written by persons of any other nationality – is their prerogative. Surely this play – an international story written in German and translated into English – is a perfect choice for the International Festival due to its multi-faceted international character and, not least, because it entertains.

John Smythe:

I do not ask for “the great social-realist work” Simon. Just one example of a long neglected work penned with ebullient creative skill is Bruce Masons Hongi (first written for radio in 1968, revised for stage by 1974). His view of the role of British royalty in facilitating the musket wars is something we should all be familiar with. Is anyone?

Nor have I specified the “bloodlines of playwrights”. Roger Hall, who has done more than anyone to hold the mirror up to NZ society, is English born. Leo Gen Peters, who led and directed the devising of last year’s excellent Death and the Dreamlife of Elephants – set in central Wellington – is American.

There have been many NZ plays involving immigrants (Pacific Island, Indian, Chinese, Arabic …) and of course that is a distinctive and important part of the NZ experience. And when they distill the particular well, they are universal.

NZ playwrights have also addressed global themes. Dean Parker’s Baghdad, Baby! springs to mind. I venture to suggest that what is simultaneously homegrown yet exotic to white middle-class theatre audiences and international festivals (e.g. Maori and Pacific Island theatre especially) gets more of a chance in better funded productions than Pakeha stories, which are easily supplanted by British, American and Australian ones.

David, your argument is more valid for totally commercial privately owned theatre companies. I think there is more responsibility with public funding. And all theatre companies will tell you their biggest commercial successes have been with NZ plays. It is a sad day if we see the performing arts as no different than any other item of trade.

Simon Taylor:

John, a touch of lèse majesté to say “I do not ask for the great social-realist work”! Well, I certainly don’t. But perhaps if you’re in a position to say “I do not ask” & so on, you’re in a position to ask Circa why it chose this play. And not Hongi, which surely ought to have sprung to mind directly. Had you suggested it.

I don’t essentially agree with you. Because if state funded theatres are obliged to produce NZ plays – and I still think the question needs to be considered, What is a NZ play? – then New Zealanders are obliged to ensure that state funded theatres not only survive but flourish.

The issue is equally political and economic. While the funder, or patron, does not oblige the theatres it funds to produce NZ plays… then… and while the funder, or patron, does not provide for a dramaturg or give the director(s) enough time to engage in dramaturgy, then, it is hardly surprising nobody’s dusting off Bruce Mason or The Wind and the Rain, or what have you.

We have, in other words, to ask for policy, which while not restrictive is realistic in generating a vital theatre that includes the NZ playwright’s contribution as much as anyone’s, without giving it precedence. I object to the precedence you give the playwright. It smacks of the easy answer with an aftertaste of the ideological: since he is an Englishman! Scrub that, A NZ playwright, then it is a NZ play! As I said, the authorial preference.

The Circa production is a NZ work of a German play. You say you’re not concerned with bloodlines?

The state funds on the bases of cultural identity and proximity – to what is readily understood because it has been done before. More should be asked of the funder.

And, John, I refuse to be drawn into the argument over whether Roger Hall has done more than anyone to hold the mirror up to NZ society, presented here with inimitable flippancy. He has of course done nothing more (nor less) than hold the mirror up to himself.

And, John, Roger entered the profession when there was one, not the “items of trade” you so rightly decry. As a playwright he benefitted from his engagement with professional community theatres inestimably, when there were such things. He was fostered by and in a milieu that simply does not exist, that has in fact been undone.

Knowing how it was undone might help us put it back together, so long as we don’t stitch ourselves up with the exercise of false conscience, pursuing shibboleths like ‘the obligation to produce New Zealand plays.’ RNZ’s state is about to get a lot sorrier and there was a time it was the nursery and provided the necessaries for NZ writers, many playwrights among them, of criticism and encouragement. We ought not to let what’s left pass without a fight. [link]

Corus:

He is drunk.

Michael Smythe:

Corus – don’t be unkind – Simon’s incoherent rambling may simply be the natural and inevitable outcome of attempting to avoid stitching himself up with the exercise of false conscience and /or pursuing shibboleths.

Simon – It’s hard to reconcile your nostalgia for the good old days of theatre companies and your championing of National Radio with your not very successful efforts to pour scorn on John’s very legitimate, and clearly communicated, concerns. His key questions are dead simple – If tax-payer funded theatres do not get new New Zealand plays to the stage who will? And is there a more legitimate time to do it than as a contribution to an international arts festival?

The ‘what is a New Zealand play anyway’ question is a red herring swimming down a cul-de-sac. All that is relevant to this discussion is that the work being reviewed is clearly not a New Zealand play.

Simon Taylor:

Michael, perhaps you heard it on the bloodline and can extrapolate the dead simplicity of John’s Key Questions naturally and inevitably. I am happy to read that they are:

If tax-payer funded theatres do not get new New Zealand plays to the stage who will?

And is there a more legitimate time to do it than as a contribution to an international arts festival?

The first question is surely answered by John’s

the groundswell created by the creative co-ops whose often extraordinary works are celebrated on this website.

The second question, desperately seeking legitimacy on Circa’s behalf for Circa’s contribution to an international arts festival, Circa should be asked to answer.

The shame and crime here, on which I drunkenly pour my incoherent scorn, is both that there no longer exists a national “ecology of theatre” because of the way public funds are dispensed, because CNZ [link] lacks policy directives, among other and less important factors, AND that when in a position to condemn the agency that funds Circa, from the public coffer, John would rather lead the critique, the discussion, down the cul-de-sac to chase the red herring of moral (read ‘cultural’) rectitude – in an arena that is already ethically compromised – by chorusing that it ought to have done the right thing by us, and, with unwitting irony, suggesting that

the role of New Zealand companies is to produce New Zealand work, especially of the kind that might be attractive to other international festivals.

It is for me, Michael, to reconcile my nostalgia for “the good old days of theatre companies [sic!] and [my] championing of National Radio with [my] not very successful efforts to pour scorn on John’s very legitimate, and clearly communicated, concerns.” I think I’ll pour another.

Cheers.

The following is a comment posted in response to John Smythe’s review of Ross Jolly’s production of Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller at Circa Theatre, Wellington. (Full review here.)

A couple of statements stick out at odd angles from this review so I feel compelled to comment. To wit, the first line:

Since Shakespeare died many playwrights have attempted to add to the library of plays about the kings and queens of England-cum-Great Britain.

No. It’s really the first three words I have a problem with, “Since Shakespeare died”… Does John Smythe mean ’since 1616′ or ‘because of the death’ and therefore having to take it into account, the death, or that he did die; or, additionally, and to gloss, ‘Since Shakespeare did die in 1616, young, only 52, because of that and ever since many, many playwrights have both tried to emulate him and to enter the canon, add to the library, with plays about British kings and queens’? (What is England-cum-Great Britain? A sort of metaphorical fluffer? connoting a white-out? … a fluff, nonetheless.) The statement is to say the least disingenuous. And as unworthy as the following of inclusion in a serious review with a serious message. But ought we to believe John Smythe?

Surely the role of New Zealand companies is to produce New Zealand work, especially of the kind that might be attractive to other international festivals.

It has become something of a strategy or model for theatre companies in NZ to produce work to appeal to international festivals. There are cultural as well as economic reasons for this: these reasons warrant examination beyond John Smythe’s self-complacent sureness about the role of NZ companies being to produce NZ work. (I’m thinking particularly of Red Leap Theatre’s The Arrival, here.) About that notional role, what makes John Smythe so sure?

What irks me most, I suppose, since I don’t agree with the message, is the reviewer’s presumption to being able to suspend our disbelief for us. For example, in lines like this:

I must suppose the way director Ross Jolly and his cast have rehearsed this play has not exploited its true qualities.

What a bizarre thing to say! Since Shakespeare died I have not heard attempted such additions to the library of bizarre things as assayed here in the name of John Smythe and under the guise of a review. The failure of the review lies in direct proportion to the degree to which it oversteps itself in finding a critical point of view. Yes, such a rare state of affairs, that the pitfall of commonplace is not avoided. Or, ought one to take seriously that the role of NZ companies is to produce NZ work? After all, what was Downstage Upfront but a protracted promotion of this facile agenda? [here]

It’s never fun to watch or read backstory, but as has become the rule, the review duly and dully provides us with its own, in a series of paragraphs commencing with one that shouts:

To backtrack: …

I’ve an interest in criticising the writing of theatrical reviews but the standard has slipped so far – or trickled down so deep, as we will see – that it has become hard to find anything worth holding onto, anything worth salvaging. My interest in these lines is the inspiration behind the review, just as for the review it is the inspiration behind the choice against staging a NZ play… or NZ-cum-Aotea roa-cum what may.

Returning to the question of why Circa chose Mary Stuart as their Festival play, yes, I accept it is part of our own cultural heritage.

Whose? There’s that word ‘culture’ being bandied about again, and the reviewer clearly does not accept that the choice of play meets with the standards he imputes to the professional culture, or cultural heritage, of our theatres! To gloss once more: ‘Our theatres do our plays to serve our culture’… out of respect for what? To attract the interest of international festivals?

The concession the reviewer makes is a sham, a nod to the ‘Let’s-acknowledge-but-then-pass-quickly-over-the-whole-issue’ crowd ‘That Blighty too is in one’s blood, with its bloody kings and queens, if not in one’s England-cum-Great Britain.’ The issue of belonging is as important here, in NZ, as the issue of what art is, because it’s about what art does and whether it can or ought to have ongoing relevance.

The ad for Playmarket bores me, as if, as in the review’s self-conscious rhetoric – an attempt at pointedness? – the directors of Circa can possibly not be aware of the ‘many superb but neglected plays by proven [how?] New Zealand playwrights that languish on [its] shelves.’ [sic & here]

Or do they just find it easier to ride on the coat-tails of international companies and be a ‘cover band’ for their cultures?

Sends a shiver down my spine just to think of it! Circa, Downstage, Court, Fortune, ATC, ‘cover bands’?! The suggestion is diabolical. And, again, what are the cultures of these international companies? Since they have coat-tails, must be something élitist.

The reviewer saves his graceless coup de grace – of what I wish to entertain is a far more blooded subject than he gives it credit for being – until the last when names are named:

I find it [...] strange that Peter Biggs, an ex chair of Creative New Zealand, should be sponsoring this production. I am just as bemused that Chris Finlayson, an ex-chair of the CNZ Arts Board and now our Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, has only ever sponsored Circa productions of non-New Zealand plays.

Oh? I was hoping for so much more, that the criticism might ground itself beyond the tired stories we tell ourselves in order we may sleep at night, AKA ‘Telling our own stories in our own words.’ The living discussion of WHY DO THIS PLAY NOW? still seems to be one in which we are unwilling and perhaps incapable of engaging, at least, as per the evidence given here. Too soon mired in the side issue of NZ bolsterism.

To end:

The failure to recognise the fundamental responsibility of state-funded theatres trickles down from the top, it seems, and now runs very deep.

… We visit and take pictures of the Grand Canyon because we don’t have our own one. But at least we understand how it was formed.

- Walton Ford, here

What do they believe that they can act the way that they do? I would not ask about the motivation of the action. I would ask what they have to believe about themselves in order to act, to make the actor, in the broadest sense. Fine to say ‘a cog in the machine,’ but reductive, since the actor is also a machine, even as it or he or she plays a part. Even as it or he or she plays a part both part and the performance of it are brought together in the action. A subject and subjects are produced. An object and objects are produced. And there in the exchange of objects and subjects, at the moment of the contagion and of their mutual interpenetration, both action and interaction are confused, subjects objectivised, objects subjectivated. That is, the actor combines, in the best alchemical sense, elements.

- Walton Ford, here

So it is with politicians. But with politicians the press have given up questioning or describing the dramaturgy, let alone identifying the elements of a production, in an action. What am I saying? The press have long ago given up doing the same for theatre: critique is generally missing. And a knowingness is brought to bear on film critique that tends to hide the object, being, in this case, the action. To clarify: the subject of the spectator produced in the reviewer or critic by the film – and TV show – gets in the way of a critique, in that part of the object of the film – or TV show – is also to confuse object and subject in an action. David Byrne sings it like this, I can’t see, cos my head’s in the way.

- Walton Ford, here

So it is with politicians in the era of the popular press. They dematerialise into the media at the same time as the media pretend to the function of a critical press. There is an internalisation, a metabolism of populisms. The Rt. Hon. John Key’s putative populism is metabolised critically in the populism of the media in general. This is not the old-fashioned ‘feeding on itself’ of the media; or that phenomenon whereby the saying of a thing made it so, like the Führer’s repetition’s compulsion to generate in the populace compulsion: repeat the lie often enough and they will eventually believe it. No. The fact of popular media, the populism of a medium like Twitter – which in the aforesaid way may be seen to be cannibalistic, or self-insistent – is a mirror for the Prime Minister’s populism on the same surface. There are no second or third degrees here. There is in fact a sense in which representation has been surpassed in the immediate effectuation of the image, where effect equals affect. Given the immediacy of ‘as it happens,’ a Prime Minister flourishing in a medium which imbues him with its magical powers, what parts are installed, swapped, lost, broken, repaired or replaced where there is no interaction? The action lies elsewhere than in the interaction between the Rt. Hon. John Key and the popular press where these parts will be put into play. Hence the question: Who do they think they are? These politicians. And: Who are they to think they are? How are they able to act? Since the power of puppetry and the puppetry of power have become unequal.

- Walton Ford, here

- Artaud, Portrait de Paule Thévenin, dit ‘Paule aux ferrets,’ 24 May, 1947

Paule Thévenin [Artaud's friend and literary executor]described to me the process of being drawn by Artaud as that of “being skinned alive.” … Artaud … standing up before a table … would scream, hum and invent new vocabularies … The sitter was forbidden to move … but was … encouraged to talk … to Thévenin, it seemed that Artaud was intent on drawing the gestural movements of her face, in particular those of her mouth as it disintegrated into a blur and then re-cohered in the process of forming and articulating words. The act of drawing, for Artaud, was that of a revelatory excavation into what he saw as the lost or neglected material of the human anatomy.

- Stephen Barber, The Screaming Body: Antonin Artaud: Film Projects, Drawings and Sound Recordings, Creation Books, 1999, p. 63 [all emphases throughout this post added]

- Artaud, Le Théâtre de la cruauté, March 1946

Why are we here? How have we arrived at the body without organs of Artaud?

We are here simply to draw attention to connections: Balthus [there] to Artaud (who has been here before, of course [link]). So primarily Balthus, looping back, in an unoriginal loop, Balthus whom Artaud called his double in the happier days of The Theatre of Cruelty, Paris, 1930s, before Dublin, Ireland, and Artaud’s arrest on September 23 [link], 1937, for living in a park, his deportation, and his committal to an asylum (for another sense of committal, see here), and under threat of being placed in a concentration camp, his circulation among asylums, during which time his teeth fell out and he lost his looks – he had been, as Stephen Barber comments, “one of the most dandified and elegant of the Surrealists” [ibid., p. 44], and was matched in beauty by Balthus, the latter, as Mieke Bal in her monograph on him, points out, resembled him to a “remarkable” degree, as did, she adds, doubly, Jean-Louis Barrault; there being then a whole clutch of dandiacal doubles, or handsome clones, in Paris -, during which time Artaud was submitted both to electro-shock therapy, at the hands of Gaston Ferdière, director of Rodez (as Barber draws his character, a curious and dangerous combination of experimenter and anarcho-narcissist; great exponent of and publicist for electro-shock therapy, just one session of which shattered one of Artaud’s vertebrae, also psychiatrist to various art stars, Hans Bellmer, Isadore Isou, and Unica Zürin: Isou with Maurice Lemaître wrote in the volume, Antonin Artaud Tortured By The Psychiatrists, “Dr Gaston Ferdière is one of the greatest criminals in the entire history of humanity: a new Eichmann” [Barber, op. cit., p. 50]), where he commenced the series of drawings illustrating this post, graphically reconstituting himself in your eye, and to the ministrations, between 1938 and 1939, of a therapist, whose star was soon and sure to rise, who again asserted the irrecoverability of Artaud’s condition, Jacques Lacan, and towards whom the invective against a “sexually obsessed psychiatrist” is directed by Artaud in his 1947 essay, Van Gogh The Suicide Of Society, a psychiatrist he calls “docteur L.” [Ibid., p. 91 n. 27]

- Artaud, La Maladresse sexuelle de dieu, 1946

It extends into the thereafter of Artaud’s final years, 1946-8, in which he wrote the essay on his double, Facts Going Back To 1934: The Misery Painter, indeed, in which he writes: “All painters bring their anatomy, their physiology, their saliva, their flesh, their blood, their sperm, their vices, their sexual diseases, their pathology, their prudishness, their health, their character, their personality or their madness into their works.” [In ibid., p. 79] He also wrote of Balthus that he “makes use of the real only in order to crucify it.” [Ibid., p. 78]

- Artaud, Couti l’anatomie, 1945

to validate an existence or the body, Artaud must reduce language and reduce corporeal matter to an extreme essence. Everything extraneous to the body is refused – all nature and all culture – so that the body is by itself, sharpened, bone and nerve, without family, “god” or internal organs. It can also move before itself in space, in order to create and generate itself. It is unprecedented and has no progenitor. … aggressive process of reduction [la soustraction {link}?] … absolute density in the image … transform the human body … language … is fragmented, but its screaming desire for physical transmission sutures the pieces back together again in the spectators bodies …
- Ibid., p. 102

- Artaud, Le Totem, 1946

Another connection drawn attention to here is that celebrated under the emblematic skin of the BwO, or “body without organs,” between Gilles Deleuze and Artaud. Pictorially what this calls to mind, in light of Deleuze’s writing on him, is Francis Bacon’s figuration of meat before human flesh and the head before the face. But the demand made of spectators that they “suture” body (and language) parts back together and that they are placed under this injunction by a “screaming desire for physical transmission” theatricalises the moment, staging the action inside the bodies of the spectators, where, presumably, they make sense of the encounter with nonsense, a sense which does not lose, for being active and within an evental horizon, of the scream, its visceral, genealogical element, and does not forget or forego its ground in nonsense.

Dance is how the body patrols, tests and defends itself from obliteration: so, the body engaged in this act must by essence be distorted, painful and alert – as well as in ecstasy at its own movements and gestures. As Tatsumi Hijikata – the Japanese inventor of the seminal “Butoh” dance performance art of the 1960s, and the only artist ever to have advanced Artaud’s work – understood, the scream is the end point of dance; the scream exerts an exactly choreographed image of the body with all its extremes of sensation.

… awareness of the body’s necessity is made to develop [in the scream]…

… the scream is Artaud’s dense language – the tearing apart of meaning and representation, and the only way to project his authentic body.

- Ibid., p. 103

- photo of Tatsumi Hijikata in Revolt Of The Flesh

The next connection, then, is to dance, to a dance that we can care about.

At least in its original form of the 1960s, Tatsumi Hijikata’s “Ankoku Butoh” (“Dance Of Utter Darkness”), accords exactly with Artaud’s ultimate conception of the dancing human body in a state of violent self-interrogation, traversed simultaneously by sensations of ecstasy and annihilation [pain?]. Much of the initial imagery of Butoh emerged from the devastated Tokyo of the end of the Second World War, during which tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants had been reduced to ashes by American and British firebombing, leaving only a few fragments of surviving buildings – such a complete return to zero necessarily resulted in a crucial sensation of liberation and sexual experimentation, manifested in Tokyo’s extreme forms of art, film and sex of ensuing riotous decades. Hijikata (1928-1986), a close collaborator of other Japanese 1960s avant-garde legends such as Shuji Terayama, Eikoh Hosoe, Kazuo Ohno and Tadanori Yokoo, read Artaud’s work assiduously as soon as it appeared in Japanese translation; another of his vital preoccupations was with the dolls created by Hans Bellmer. 1n 1971, he wrote an essay on Artaud entitled Artaud’s Slipper, but this intense enagement with Artaud’s work primarily manifested itself in his dance performances such as Revolt Of The Flesh (1968) and Story of Smallpox (1972), and in his filmic and photographic collaborations with Eikoh Hosoe, who was also responsible for the infamous book of photographs of Yukio Mishima, Killed By Roses, from 1963, in which Mishima’s body is depicted in erotic contortions of bondage and torture [guilty of sexuality?]. In 1984, Hijikata heard Artaud’s recording To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, which the writer Kuniichi Uno had brought back from Paris, where he had been collaborating with Gilles Deleuze. As a result, Hijikata worked on a performance based in part on To Have Done With The Judgement Of God with the choreography Min Tanaka, but both were dissatisfied with the result. Hijikata was formulating a new work based on his engagement with Artaud and his own revolutionary conception of the human body in crisis, tentatively entitled Experiment With Artaud, when he suddenly died of liver failure in Tokyo in January 1986 (much of his work towards the project had entailed five-day non-stop drinking bouts in the labyrinthine bar districts of Tokyo as he formulated his ideas with Uno). In February 1998, Min Tanaka undertook a series of three unique performances in Tokyo based on Artaud’s scenario The Conquest Of Mexico, which undoubtedly marked the most astonishing choreographic experiment with Artaud’s work to date. Interviews with Eikoh Hosoe, Min Tanaka, Akiko Motofuji, Kuniichi Uno, Tokyo, July 1997-July 1998.

- Ibid., note on Tatsumi Hijikata, pp. 109-110

- Artaud, Les Illusion de l’âme, 1946

I have cited this note in full because it is remarkable in several connections, or directions: 1) Artaud to Tatsumi Hijikata, and butoh; 2) its speaks to the role of Artaud’s influence in the Japan of the 1960s, and not to his influence alone; 3) an ongoing confluence is evoked which draws both from 1960s France, the elevation of Artaud in this milieu of revolution and experimentation, and Japan, wherein Gilles Deleuze collaborates in some wise, on something, with Kunniichi Uno (if you have any information in regard to this connection, please contact me here); 4) there is a closer connection here, in view of the importance of butoh in the world of dance in New Zealand, and, 5) the enormous impact Min Tanaka’s work has had here, through our leading directors of dance-theatre, Douglas Wright and Michael Parmenter, and through his many visits, both to teach and perform. … So, the question of this NZ connection and the resonance of this work in particular here arises, and it is twofold: 6) why is butoh central to local dance-theatre? 7) Can we say then that Artaud’s work and its revivification in the 1960s, in both Japan and France, is alive in NZ?

- Artaud, Portrait de Colette Allendy, 1947

This note in NOTES:

Eschleman, who devoted many years to his translations, is the only translator to have created an accurate English-language counterpart for Artaud’s language; virtually all other volumes of translations of Artaud’s work are erroneous and should be avoided like the plague.

- Ibid., p. 107

And:

Skinned naked in a bath of electricity, each electro-shock patient is exposed to an artificially-created death – at this stage in Artaud’s work [1946], all manifestations of death are states of black magic that have to be overturned.

- Ibid., p. 96

It is a mistake to think of representation as superficial and of representationality as dwelling on the surfaces of things, while the depths with disuse go septic. So it is a mistake to view pathologies as bubbling up from the underneath, bursting through, worming their way up like the evil doubles of roots, and pocking the surface, cratering it, oozing out, crusting over, forming subcutaneous – and sub-representational – reservoirs of infection, which will need before disease spreads to be lanced and drained. So it is mistake that is fun to make. Theatrical.

It is not also the visual field which is occupied. The visual field is the last to be occupied, the most despotic once its territory is claimed. Consider the images on the screen of the ultrasound scan. The usually monochrome architecture of a living organism, perhaps yours. Are these images primarily visual? Or given the instrument acting on them, are they acoustic images? The socalled delivery mechanism relies on a visual index, from which a diagnosis can be made, or, again, it relies on a visualised place on which the performance of diagnosis can take place.

The diagnosis is a negotiation with the representation. For there to be a diagnosis there must be a representation. The trick lies therein that the depths are seemingly brought to light in the representation, they are revealed on the surface. But this simply reinforces the impression of the representation, of something in the depths of the bios being represented to our eyes, shifting the emphasis away from the delivery mechanism, the media – or medium. The representation becomes an index to pathology by sleight of hand.

The diagnosis is a technical performance, with instruments, as well as taking place in a territory described by technological limits. The latter, the lab and the machine which carries the signal interpreting it into a visual sign, precede an instrumentalization of the surface, the performance proper, made possible by the fact of representation. Both patient and specialist or the doctor and both the subject and technician are complicit in the performance as the signs are there for both to read.

The difference is not one of interpretation. The interpretation has already occurred in the ultrasound scan conveying its information to the screen. The difference is juridical, resting on a jurisprudence of who may by law take up the tools, of who can claim the authority to act on the information represented on screen, and subsequently in photos of the scan.

The lab technician will usually demur from giving a definitive reading. What they say will be some kind of rehearsal for the official diagnosis and prognosis, the handing down of the sentence. And you yourself will be able to play your part in the performance, which, when it comes down to it, involves no more than a shuffling of amortized planes, the instrumentalization of given representations.

In other words, the representation enables the instrumentalization which usually has surgery as its primary metaphor. Even when the shadowy figure in the scan is moving independently,the institutional hierarchy in medicine acts from the cutters down: they would rather have it that the baby is cut out of the womb. Which is to say no more than that the surgeons are at the top of the pyramid. But the fact that they are despotically colours the whole field, the whole drama, all the performances, yours included. Or, you could say, this is how it works in a surgical theatre: the light falls on all unequally; there is the instrumentalization enabled by the representation and then the performance of which the wielding of glinting steel plays only a part, a lie that tells its own truth. The truth is a metaphor.

Simply this: representation is a way of cutting up the actual in order to redeploy it according to specific knowledges and understanding and prevailing doxa. What cannot be got away from is this deathlike insistence, capturing, indexing the real, and giving it a virtual halflife in representation.

Samedi 5 décembre de 17 à 18h30
Centre culturel suédois, 11 rue Payenne, 75003 Paris
………………………….

Collège de la Biennale de Paris :
Les leçons de la soustraction
Il y a pléthore de tout. C’est pourquoi il est temps d’envisager l’activité
productrice comme une soustraction. Furtives et exclusivement orales, Les
leçons de la soustraction prendront place en tous lieux, de façon sporadique
et à la dérobée. Dans la pratique, on oeuvrera en retirant avec méthode un
petit ou un grand quelque chose à ce qui existe déjà.

- via Anart

La soustraction, subtraction: I like the word in French. It has the sense of undermining. It is like that other word that is better in Danish, Gjentagelsen, the title of Kierkegaard’s 1843 essay, Englished as Repetition. The “good Danish word,” Samuel Weber points out, contains the word for “again,” gjen, and “take,” tagelsen, which looks to be in the infinitive form. For Kierkegaard, again, taking this from Weber, such a repetition is different; it is impossible, in so far as it removes and acts at a remove, so that what is repeated simply cannot be the same: identity neither exists between something and the repeat, nor does causality, in the form of consequence, nor does reflection. There is a sequence, but on the second take it does not attribute to itself the power to bestow, or contribute, identity. It is simply a second take on… a room overlooking a square, a scene to which we return only to find it… displaced, a displacement we share with the scene, through Gjentagelsen; it is recurrent, then. Again. [Samuel Weber, Chapter 8 in Theatricality as Medium, Fordham Uni. Press, New York, 2004, pp. 200-228]

The French word does not display such a marked contrast with the English as the Danish but I think it exerts a similar pull, represents a certain difference, and presents an image that compels thought to take up on it; as if there were a mystery to it.

Il faut donc soustraire, toujours soustraire pour retrouver l’image à l’état pur. La soustraction fait apparaître l’essentiel, à savoir que l’image est plus importante que ce dont elle parle, tout comme le langage est plus important que ce qu’il signifie.

- Jean Baudrillard, courtesy of Louise Desrenards

Soustraire carries whatever it is, the je n’sais quoi of it, further; or, more literally, draws it out, or from. Traire is used for milking the cow. We can visualise from this drawing-from how we get to the trait, as a stretch, prolongation, or an extension, which becomes understood as a feature, something which is, rather than unfolded (explicated), extended, like an essential difference, a point, an essence, a distillation. Yet with soustraire, it may be sublime.

What happens in the first passive synthesis, sub-representationally, with the drawing off of differences (or excitations) is that they come to resonate in the second passive synthesis. The word Deleuze uses is s’approfondir: the synthesizing of excitations and bound egos deepens in what may be called a catachrony, a taking on of a temporal element in virtual memory, a deepening in time. Hence, catachrony. Another way of saying this might be, time-mining. This deepening occurs under the influence of a ‘dark precursor’ below the ‘moving soil’ of evanescent matter. What is there? in these lower depths?

Firstly, there are only lower depths, each plumbing deeper, each going down more deeply in the Great Down:

There is no depth which is not a ’seeker’ of a lower depth: it is there that distance develops, but distance understood as the affirmation of that which it distances, difference as a sublimation of the lower.

- Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Continuum, p. 294

The structure of time in the process of catachrony, or virtual memory, acts as transcendental ground, a sub-representational infinitude.

In the light of la soustraction, as a philosophical attractor, we might say that it is an extension of this idea. And, possibly, as a ’seeker’ of a lower depth, la soustraction is a vermiculator, but, unlike in Negarestani, time is wormed out, vermiculate and the ( )hole itself, catachronous: think a catacomb memory, speak.

Alain Badiou subtracts from philosophy its truth-telling power; in Deleuze such a subtraction would be an extension. The sub-representational genesis of the object is something like a guarantor of its intelligibility. The void is devoid of actors in Badiou. For Deleuze the void is not all take, and the dark precursor is there mining time, which is a fold and an endless fold in the void. Enfolded in its pleats are those intensities, differences, which it is the responsibility of the structure of the syntheses to extract and purify. To draw out and distill.

My father was fond of quoting Eliot saying, and I think I would rather misquote the latter in an act of remembrance of the former than discover the source of the citation:

I distill and distill and distill.
And the little that is left,
that is my essence.
That is my art.

Beckett’s repetition of Joyce, whose paternal influence he had such trouble drawing off, distills itself, is subtracted, in Beckett’s work in a similar way. But what is the relation of subtraction to theatre? What follows as a note is intended for fleshing out at a later date:

The last thing theatre is is an art of subtraction. There is always too much. This is the very meaning of the word ‘theatrical.’ There is so so much it is not containable onstage. In the medieval mystery play it goes down. In the Age of Enlightenment a deus ex machina descends like a scoop to skim off this excess. In the 19th Century we see tabs and skirts and other curtains gleefully multiplying like an erotics of underwear, to hide it by showing it. A textile fantasia and great precursor of modernity’s obsession with fashion, nothing in itself. The Elizabethan stage manifested a linguistic excessiveness unparalleled. Shakespeare damned by Shaw for not subtracting! Attic drama moves the very event offstage, focusing us on the peripeteia (Περιπέτεια), as if to say, Theatre is close to but not the mystery itself. the mystery of subtraction…

The 20th Century’s obsession with the forms of representation, its saturation in imagery, can be seen as inoculation, literally, and a fetishization. Evidence, as a matter of course, I would say, that we don’t see. Because of a didacticism whereby looking is constructed as something that leads nowhere. With so much to see, we don’t.

Moving is a form of looking. This may seem a strange thing to say in an age of mobile labour forces but despite appearances I am talking about reality. What I mean in view of moving that we tend to carry representational framing devices with us everywhere, which themselves don’t move. This is a self-imposed too-much-ness. It constitutes the visual field at once as theatrical. We even know that the whole picture evades us. But we yearn to be drawn on our conclusions nonetheless. As if in the interval of a play. We know our points of view to be provisional but there is always about to be too much going on and for fear of reductionism we bear witness to the frames by which are as much blinded as fixed in time and space, unmoving.

Theatre is the opposite of subtraction. This is why a theatre is the very thing a philosophy is supposed not to be.

- nb

- Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), The Great Wave at Kanagawa, from series 36 Views of Mount Fuji, 1823–1829

What do we know about the virtual? It comes to Deleuze via Bergson. It belongs to the third time of the synthesis. It belongs to the future and yet it is the past. It is the being of the past. It may be called the way the past bears on the present producing the future, or bears the present forward on a wave into the future.

- Katsushika Hokusai, Choshi in the Simosa province

In Deleuze, however, understanding the virtual as the ontological past involves thinking about time differently. He presents this different idea of time in four paradoxes: 1) the contemporaneity of the past and the present, without which no present could pass; i.e. it could not pass without sharing its past-ness with its present-ness; 2) the coexistence of all of the past with a present, since every present passes, not just this one; so the past coexists in its entirety with any present; 3) the preexistence of the past: for the present to come along at all, it has to have a ground in time; while it may be represented as a past present, the general, pure, ontological, transcendental past, or the past which has never happened, is the ground on which the past singular to a given present exists and can be represented, and without which it cannot be; 4) the past coexists with itself, to an infinite degree, as an infinity of degrees of past-ness and present-ness, which are in the Bergsonian context degrees of contraction and relaxation, the present being the infinite coexisting past at its most contracted degree.

- Katsushika Hokusai, Whaling off Goto

This conception of time is beautiful but also counter-intuitive. It seems to go against both the linear and cyclical notions of time which have the virtue of at least being encountered in experience. But, and I think this is the point, the experience by which time is linear or cyclical, or even that by which we know it to be curved, is part of a structure for which it does not itself provide the ground. Three structures which come to mind are: the structure of consciousness, ungrounded by the unconscious, the structure of Nature, ungrounded by evolution, the structure of knowledge, ungrounded by critique. These ‘ungroundings’ also present the conditions of possibility for that which they unground: the unconscious somehow gives rise to consciousness, evolution generates Nature, with its perceived cycles, and critique reveals a limit against which knowledge can be defined.

- coasters by Yuko Shimizu

It is as if they always required this other in order to function properly. Knowledge alway needed a limit so that it could be called knowledge and now we can say, But of course knowledge is defined against its limit and by its limit. It is the job of scientists to push the limit!

- Katsushika Hokusai, Carp Leaping Up A Cascade

Where to, if there is always a limit? Or, better, in what form? Because the unknowable still remains, we can only know what is so far unknown. So far: thereby invoking a conception of history, one that is linear, materialist, and only really reaches back to the Enlightenment, 300 or so materialist, linear, years – of progress … with a major faultline running through it: its own limit. Time.

- Yuko Shimizu, Revenge of the Geisha

Time is relative. To what? To POV, but not to POV absolutely. For time to be relative it needs to have specified at least two points, which, then are only relative to each other, two POVs at points in space. The proposition of relativity is an attempt at critique which is given in full view of the absolute. Nothing is hidden but that which was anyway in plain view: that time is not the absolute. Time is relative in so far as it has physical qualities, which disqualify it from absolute-ness, but in no way condemn it to contingency or relativity in some kind of absolute form. The truth of relativity is then that it is relative, i.e. structural.

- Yuko Shimizu, Drowned in The Sea of Polka Dots

Levi Bryant describes very well how ontological time works to ground structure: …”it is only by positing that the past is preserved in the present as a feature of being itself that we are able to explain how synchrony can function in the unfolding diachrony of the actual.” [Levi Bryant, "Politics of the Virtual," in Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 9, Palgrave, 2004, pp. 333-348, p. 339] You can hear a concession to linearity, the ‘diachrony of the actual,’ but of the linear in which the nonlinear functions, the ’synchronic’ and the structural. What allows the diachrony that we experience as linear time, socalled, is that other feature of the being of time, of what time is, a transcendental past, synchronic, preserved in the present, which therefore provides an ontological ground for structuralism.

- Katsushika Hokusai, Tea-house at Koishikawa, the morning after a snowfall

The point is worth labouring because it is difficult, ought to raise questions and has far-reaching implications: there is a different conception of time; the past is preserved in the present; the structure whereby an object has virtual and actual parts comes from this idea of time.

- Yuko Shimizu, The Big Wave

Following the traces of a previous thought: What do actors do? What do directors do?

Actors are necessary, even if they are reduced to automata or to machines. But are directors necessary to the theatrical work? What about actor-managers, don’t they in the absence of directors do just as well? Won’t they do just as well?

- Franz von Stück, Sphinx, 1895

The question, Is the director necessary? seems to arise in a context where its obverse is granted as beyond question, that actors are above all necessary, or something taking their place, a reduction. Is the role of the actor then structural where that of the director is not? If the actor’s place may be taken by something else – whether we grant that this is a reduction or not – that place has a relational significance which goes beyond what may be predicated of the actor.

The predicate would be the definition occurring according to common sense in answer to the question, What is an actor? in what has been called an Aristotelian logic. So: An actor is he who sees the gun on the nightstand in the first act, firing it in the third. An actress is she who is implied to have placed it there, to imply that she knows full well it will be seen, so that her character may be avenged on another, who, we are given to understand, has betrayed her… character… at another, earlier and fictional time… Not to overcomplicate matters…

And therefore, it may be predicated of both actor and actress that they serve the script, in so far as they perform the actions of fictional characters from it and play the emotions of those characters, so that we, the audience, know what is happening in the story; the plot comprises the series of actions and emotions played moment by moment by the actors; the story is how we the audience contrive to join together the events we witness, feelingly, on stage in order to make sense of what is happening. We follow the story by following the plot which follows the script. Actors act the plot, thickening it and thinning it as the literary precursor, the script, directs them so to do. They follow the script. As does the director.

He sees the gun on the nightstand; he later uses it. What is the minimum we need to know of the plot to get the story? Or, by what variations, introduced at the level of how it is played, is the plot now another demanding that we make up a different story? She put it the gun there for him to see? Or for us to see? Did we know that the playwright had read Chekhov? The gun disappears. There is a shot offstage. Or is it an overstretched violin string?

- Man Ray, Le violin de Ingres, 1924

A violin is on the nightstand. Are we going to assume that she intends him to use a string as a garotte in order to avenge herself on someone who has – before the action begins – betrayed her? When does the action begin, anyway?

We are being directed by both actor and actress in how we make up the story of the characters they are playing for us. For us. How dare they intercede between the writer’s intentions and the play?! He’s simply being duped by her into doing something that will remove him from acts four and five! So she can run off with someone else, he having done her dirty work. Stupid man! Wicked woman!

- Fuseli, Bottom

(Stupid man, wicked woman, about sums up the reach of contemporary New Zealand TV drama. Although what wickedness there is is implied to have been produced in women (in their characters) by living in a man’s world. But that’s another story. A supramorality, or metafeminism, the moral position of which, considered alongside the phenomenon of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, sits – and sucks – quite nicely.)

- Dino Valls, Calami, 2004

The actors are caught between pleasing the audience and pleasing the writer, flattering the audience that they are clever and wise – can follow the plot – while flattering the playwright for having written such compelling and life-like characters. They are a gift to an actor, or a joy to play. But, darling, I didn’t write [add character name] for you! And I despise the way you try and ingratiate yourself with the audience using a character who is basically unlikeable and is meant to be so.

The actors are neither projections of the writer’s intention, nor that of the audience’s good will. It is not so much that actors like to be liked, and are betrayed by their very human desire to please. Even when we substitute machines for actors, removing the humanity – alienating it – that was inferred to have been the source of the problem, we find that it is not. A machine still acts the part, and where the humanity of the actor was called into question, often by the actor, or else by the audience, or writer, before, now the very materiality, or substance, of the machine becomes an issue: its ontological status. Because the problem is that the actress is not what she is, or, put another way, that the actor is what he is but what he is is an illusion. Which is also why a machine can take the place of an actor: it will become a machine in a special sense, a virtual machine, like the actor or actress, when it performs.

- God

What is being an actor? Would we be better to ask what an actor does, as if Morgan Freeman were reflecting on this issue, when he said, You do what you are, so encouraging some ingénue to keep up her investigatory work. In being what she did, what was she being but an actress and what was she doing but acting, taking the part of an investigator? However, Morgan Freeman was addressing himself to some core, to a point of fundamental identity, when he said, You do what you are, as if in the doing the being was affirmed and as if such affirmation as the acting gave the being was somehow retroactive.

- Colin McCahon, I AM, 1954

There can be no greater praise for an actor than that which takes the form, “Robert Pattinson IS Edward Cullen” [link]. Does this mean that Edward Cullen is affirmed in his being by Robert Pattinson’s doing, playing him? On the other hand, “Chaste vampires are not us” [link]. But “chaste vampires” are very much us, or R us. (See the generation of “chaste vampires” with Brazilian waxes, here.)

- Stephenie Meyer

Resisting the temptation of that Mormon devil is still an admission that the temptation and the desire is real. The proposition negated in the statement “chaste vampires are not us” has already been revoked by popular consensus. Indeed, the height of flattery and the odium of having predicates applied to ‘us’ which are not ours amount to the same difference, but not to the difference of the same. What Stephenie Meyer is reported to have said of Robert Pattinson was that he “IS Edward Cullen (sometimes).” So we may as well admit it: we are chaste vampires, sometimes. However, if we do affirm our chastity in this wise, we are also involving the contrary and performing an act of vampirism by sucking the blood from the renunciation of, particularly, sex.

- Sex

Proceeding from the negative disavowal, can we make a predicate affirming what the actor is not? Say, the actor is green, or, the actress is Dorothy Parker. A curious thing happens here which is neither due to the actor not being green without cosmetic enhancement nor to the actress not actually being Dorothy Parker without metempsychosis. The difference differs: the difference between the actor and acting-green-ness (or ‘greening’) is different from the difference between the actress and playing-Dorothy-Parker (or ‘drinking and being witty,’ i.e. qualities which are predicated of Dorothy Parker). The second case is what we might call a differential representation, because the object of playing Dorothy Parker has both virtual and actual parts, representational and differential, whereas being a tree, or trying to green, while interesting and arty, does not partake of the symbolic excess of representation by which acting becomes more than mere art and the whole of imitation is found in repetition. [cf. link]

RÉSUMÉ

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp;
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

- Dorothy Parker

- Jan Saudek, The Morning, 1990 [link]

It has often been noted how a Brazilian makes a man or woman look like a child. See, for example, Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated film The Dreamers (2003), in which a triadic sexual relationship, brother, sister, male friend, and its shifting emotional and erotic dynamics, explicitly provides the spectacle we watch while the revolution is going on in the street, out the window. The background is May ‘68. The foreground action takes place in a labyrinthine Parisian apartment belonging to the parents of brother and sister: the size of the apartment, its furnishings, particularly the soft-furnishings (and comfort) both counterpoint the hard sex (and the cobbles being thrown around outside, cars set alight, etc., the violence) and point to a class difference between the male guest and the siblings. Sexual desire, or sheer eros, is the medium, the film seems to say, turning to flows, liquefying the barriers of gender, class and generation, or adulthood, and breaking down their taboos, up to the very limit of incestuous desire.

- The Dreamers, dir. Bertolucci, 2003

There is a scene in which the parents, overdetermined as adults, for the fact that adulthood here is in question – and tends to drift, redistributed and reconcatenating, reterritorializing all the more fiercely for it, along lines of class, material (furnishings) and power (of ownership, and therefore, responsibility) – visit the apartment. Despite the expectations of the audience, they are not here to check up or place a check on the adult, in the sense of R-rated, behaviour of their children. They have forgotten something trivial, necessarily, have returned from their bourgeois holiday, having left the kids at home, to retrieve it. Paris is the super-sized apartment in which the kids have been left at home, apparently, by adults, free of the kids, who are having sex outside the city, on holiday, where it can have no political implications, like dissolving barriers, by literalizing them as barricades. These reversals, I would think, between symbolic and actual, literal and imaginary, offer the dream logic of the title’s dreamers.

- Jan Saudek, Oh, Those Fabulous F. Sisters! 1983

There is another scene where the sister approaches the male friend in an enormous bathroom brandishing a razor. It may appear she is intent on emasculation, which would explain the brother’s complicity: to render his unacknowledged rival impotent. Potency is at issue, however, but only symbolically. Brother and sister conspire to shave the male friends pubic hair. The friend protests, and his protest has a political edge. He says, ‘You want to turn me back into a child. You want me to be a child.’ Child rings with the implication that the brother and sister from their shared privileged background are used to getting their own way, used to turning those below them in the social strata into children, mere instruments in their incestuous game. So the upper-class is incestuous. This is a conventional reading. But in the dream of the film, the incest is out: the brother masturbates while thinking of his sister. Eros is removing the stoppage, the block that would deny him even this. Up to the point or degree of incest.

- Jan Saudek, Parabellum, 9 mm, 1983

The protest that they want to make him look like a child has this political meaning and also invokes another prohibition, that of socalled pedophilia. In the film, nude and covered with soap and prepared for his shave, he is not like the patient in a hospital bed, or the client at the beautician’s, acquiescent in his rasage, his infantomorphosis. He squirms out of the hold of brother and sister. And something tells me that they let him get away. Because they don’t want him to be turned into a child; they don’t want to be responsible for this; as if it would be counter-productive to their desire. Keeping him suspended between adulthood and childhood, yet with some hair between his legs, suits all their purposes much better than were he to perceive having been shaved as being made a child. In other words, were they to make him a child, they would in their turn be made to see themselves as children. There is a higher principle at work than that prohibiting incest. It is that which, as Foucault says, allows the continuance of the incitement to desire. To shave him would be to place a block on desire.

- Jan Saudek, Kissing the Tears Away, 1967

This is not the case with adult adults, who have this leeway… to… But what am I saying? A brief look at the pages of a beautician’s appointment book will show that she (usually) spends most of her time (currently, Auckland suburbs) between the legs of other women, removing hair. A quick consultation with a teenager will provide you with the information that it is not at all uncommon for girls who are not even sexually active – therefore preventing the charge that they are somehow forced by men – to shave down there. The Wikipedia entry goes into some detail, to providing an educational video, about the process and history of the Brazilian. One of its better entries. We read that in the 15th Century, Pêro Vaz de Caminha gave this report of the practice of global pubic depilation: “…suas vergonhas tão altas e tão çarradinhas e tão limpas das cabeleiras que de as nós muito bem olharmos não tínhamos nenhuma vergonha” (“their private parts were so exposed, so healthy and so hairless, that looking upon them we felt no shame”). However the source for this is cited as M. Elizabeth Ginway’s Brazilian Science Fiction. [link] If this is fact, we can imagine Pêro Vaz de Caminha feeling the same way about children, that their private parts were so exposed, so healthy and hairless, that looking upon them he felt no shame. Were he to mark his attention to such matters in this way amid today’s paranoia regarding children and sex he would be held up for martyrdom… by media.

- Marcel Duchamp

As usual, Marcel Duchamp is way ahead of us. In his L.H.O.O.Q. – a little joke between friends -, Mona’s merkin has migrated to her visage. He ostensibly harboured a horror for the genitally hirsute, shown, among other givens, in his Étant donnés.

- part view, Marcel Duchamp

It seems it is in the atmosphere, now, Marcel’s horror. Hairy has become a fetish category, a matter for the specialist. Common sense, you might say: of course we should want to look on the genitalia of women – and men – without shame; we should want them to be so exposed, so healthy and hairless … that they resemble children, children’s private parts, which we are so ashamed of them having that we have used dolls to demonstrate where one ought not be touched.

- famous merkin-wearer, Lucy Lawless, as Lucretia in Spartacus, is not amused

It would be easy to contend that the erotic frisson first engendered by an encounter with the razed pubis has a lot to do with the proximity of the perverse. It’s almost like a child’s. So smooth.

In hair, you know, may collect all sorts of bacteria. To remove it offers an hygienic advantage, you see. In addition to giving all the excitement without the transgression of actually having sex as a child or with a child. Albeit that the dirtiness of children may indeed constitute their attraction, a transgenerational meme transmitted from commercial exploitation of child workers in, for example, Dickensian London, and the industrialising East today. (See Said’s Orientalism.)

But there again, we get into the area of sentimental pornography, as exemplified recently by the popular success, of The Lovely Bones, a success so hyperbolic, one can only hope something else is going on.

- Judy Fox, Sphinx, 1990 (Sphinx/Sphynx is another name for the hairless style, seen here, which being less a matter of pictorial resemblance, is a matter of literal resemblance, of the word-play on hairless pussy, the feline variety being called Sphinx/Sphynx, hence also Hollywood, a cognate)