Federico Armando Beltrán-Masses, 1885-1949, Graphic Idealism, the New Aesthetic and the best porn
– Pierrot malade, ou Pierrot et Colombine, 1929
Frederico Beltrán-Masses was a Cuban-born Spanish painter whose reputation flourished in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Friends with William Randolph Hearst, whose portrait he painted, his influence is apparent on the films of the era, particularly his body aesthetic, the look of his women. He’d already shown his notorious Salome, painted in Paris in 1918, at the XII Venice Biennale, 1920, in a pavilion dedicated to his work. When shown in London, in 1929, she was called the most daring nude ever painted, “a naked woman in a pose which no lesser artist could have attempted,” depicted in an athletically erotic position, crutch forward. It could be said that Beltrán-Masses’s athletic eroticism was fashion forward. But of course his exoticism, an Everyman’s Babylonia, his orientialism, which makes him an heir to Moreau, must also have had its fans in Hollywood.
His paintings have this patina – a built-in pathology of age, as if the materials were already in decay before he put them on the canvas. It is theatrical. But there’s a veil, a gauze, an accretion of textural detail – over everything, so that even when it’s clear, with the whites of Pierrot’s costume and the throw on the fauteuil, a sick haze is still there. Which is probably what attracted me to this painting: theatricality and pathology. And the effects of time in which both take part.
These characteristics are what I’m missing from the high definition imagery, the retina tech, which Duchamp would have recognised as belonging to a merely retinal artistic culture, that fills every screen, and screens everywhere. The tablet and touch screen might have returned something of the tactile but so much about their materiality, the glass, the plastic, the metal, while it will last a fraction of the time of one of Beltrán-Masses’s paintings, places it outside of time, which is its own sort of theatricality and pathology, but is in fact inimical to touch since our bodies tie the temporal and tactile together in a decaying, rotting and inevitably dying knot.
There’s something wrong with these paintings, even the flesh of Beltrán-Masses’s nudes, his Salome, and it’s not simply in the elision of genital detail. They look wrong and dated. It’s not simply the implicit prudery eschewing the pornographic. It might be an a-graphism. What these paintings show is the opposite of graphic. As if the clean lines and clear forms we are more familiar with and which we consider closer to nature, to visible reality, were borrowed or stolen exclusively from the clarity, the cleanliness of letters, scripts, writing, in a kind of graphic idealism. Which of course has nothing to do with nature, time, sickness and our bodies, or health, for that matter.
It lies. Graphic idealism. It glitches and because it is machine made it gives rise to an imagistic unconscious, unconsciouses, satellite imagery, computer eyes, distant from the human and un-willed. Which has been called a New Aesthetic. But these machinic aspects are possibly its solitary virtue. (Although I’ve written this sentence three times because my touchpad is playing up. Should I leave the lacuna in obeisance to this virtue?)
I’d been missing something from the imagery on my phone and computer and television and the advertisment hordings and the magazines and … and funny that newsprint retains something of an ongoing state-of-decay recalling the process of time, even more now with digital capture and printing of images showing technical progress doesn’t make for better quality. (But the involuntary shakiness, unmatching colour separations, pixelation and artifacting of the newspaper photo perhaps epitomise the New Aesthetic?) And where what I’d been missing most is most absent is where you might most expect to find it: in graphic depictions of the nude body. Porn I’ve always thought of as the first pomo artform. Bodies come together like the conjunction of letters, like X’s, spread at either end.
A friend said the best porn is the worst. But so much relies on the support medium. VHS is able to be worse. Digital break-up of flesh-tones immediately leaves the territory of even the slimmest pretext of eroticism. As an aside, this could be an observation applicable to digital imagery itself, whether reticulated at the retinal level or on the verge of breaking down in newsprint: a depth all surface. With Andy Warhol as prophet and profiteer. But I hope there’s something more profoundly superficial going on here: the digital image when it fails to represent – in its untimely decay – leaves behind representation altogether. Thinness or lack of profondeur is not the issue, nor is the intimation that the digital body at its most intimate might suddenly reveal itself at its least like a body.
Here the digital makes a short cut – tout court – allowing no natural passage of real time and cutting short the process – of decay or progress. I mean the decay can be built in to painting, the material decay bound to occur, and it can also occur. And what is presented by its inherency in the artistic project or aesthetic – decadence – is the boundedness of materiality: the unescapable depredations of… What? A throwaway society doesn’t see its treasured artifacts decay. Even its iPhone 5’s. Time no longer represents time as process. We fall immediately from one thing into another, through the screened image into what is technically chaos. The spectacle is what is longest lasting in its immediacy, then. Then there is no then.
