Showing posts with label vincent van gogh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vincent van gogh. Show all posts

3 Jul 2018

Hollywood Tales: Notes on the Relationship between Kirk Douglas and John Wayne

John Wayne as Taw Jackson and Kirk Douglas as Lomax in
The War Wagon (dir. Burt Kennedy, 1967)


I.

Commenting on a recent post illustrated with a photo of Kirk Douglas playing Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 movie Lust for Life, someone wrote to ask if I was aware of John Wayne's homophobic - though somewhat touching - reaction to his friend taking on this role.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did know of this comical exchange between Wayne and Douglas, that the latter recounted thirty-odd years later in his memoir The Ragman's Son (1988) ...


II.

According to Douglas, Wayne attended a private screening of the film and was horrified:

"Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There's so few of us left. We've got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers."

Somewhat taken aback - though more amused than angered or insulted - Douglas explained that, as an actor, he enjoyed taking on challenging roles, before adding: "It's all make-believe, John. It isn't real. You're not really John Wayne, you know."

It's an intriguing response that seems to suggest Douglas's relaxed attitude towards acting and the fact that he didn't take himself or his on-screen persona too seriously - nor that of others, including The Duke.

However, when playing the role of the emotionally intense Dutch painter, Douglas would later admit he came very close to losing his sense of professional detachment. In his autobiography, for example, he confessed:   

"I felt myself going over the line, into the skin of Van Gogh. Not only did I look like him, I was the same age he had been when he committed suicide. Sometimes I had to stop myself from reaching my hand up and touching my ear to find out if it was actually there. It was a frightening experience. That way lies madness . . . The memory makes me wince. I could never play him again.''

It should also be noted that whilst Douglas wasn't fooled by Wayne's hardman image, he nevertheless thought very highly (and very fondly) of him, describing Wayne as the perfect movie star who could get away with any line, no matter how corny, in any script, no matter how poor.

Not because he was an excellent actor, but because he had the courage to play every part in his own inimitable manner: "It wasn't John Wayne who served the roles; the roles served John Wayne."

Further - and slightly dispappointingly - Douglas expresses his preference for a John Wayne action movie, or any good, honest picture with balls, over more sophisticated art-house films. 


III.

At the end of his life, when lying in a hospital bed and dying of cancer, Wayne exchanged several mailgrams with Douglas. In one such, he jokes that he's been admitted to the hospital in order to have a cleft added to his chin so that he might look more like his friend, who replied:

"Dear John, Have you ever noticed that I never call you Duke? If I were going to use a title, it would be no less than King. Please get your ass back here soon. Love, Kirk."

It's not quite Brokeback Mountain, but it does reveal a delightful degree of playful tenderness between these two Hollywood tough guys. 


Note: Kirk Douglas and John Wayne worked together on several movies, including: In Harms Way (1965); Cast a Giant Shadow (1966); and The War Wagon (1967).   

See: Kirk Douglas, The Ragman's Son: An Autobiography, (Simon and Schuster, 1988).


17 Oct 2016

Floraphilia Redux (With Reference to the Case of Rupert Birkin)

YouTube (2009)
 

Flowering plants don't just grow in soil: they are also rooted in our hearts and blossom in our poetry; from Wordsworth's daffodils to Sylvia Plath's poppies. We love flowers and our love is like a red, red rose; just as the columbine is the emblem of our foolishness, the marsh-lily the symbol of our corruption and the narcissus conveys our conceit.

In language, as in art, we have formed an unnatural alliance with flowers and some, like Oscar Wilde, fervently hope that in the next life they might even become-flower - which is to say, beautiful but soulless. Here, I would like to examine this literary-erotic entanglement with flora and the manner in which we, like insects, become implicated in their sex games just as they are utilized in ours ...

What are flowers?

Flowers are the obscenely colourful sex organs of the flowering plant and they are what distinguishes angiosperms from other earlier forms of seed producing plant. Without flowers, an angiosperm would be just another gymnosperm: all leaf and naked of seed. Arguably, the same is true of people: they either blossom into full being like a bright red poppy, or they remain closed up within a mass of foliage and growing fat like a cabbage.

What is pollination?

Pollination is the process by which one plant receives the pollen from another: it is the botanical term for fucking. Some angiosperms are pollinated abiotically by the wind, some by water. And some rely upon small animals, such as bats or hummingbirds. But the majority, around 80%, exploit the labour of roughly 200,000 different types of insect. It is, if you like, a perfectly natural form of artificial insemination.

But insect pollination might better be viewed as a form of paid sex work, rather than erotic enslavement. Because when plants are fucked by insects the latter get something sweet in return for their services: nectar. However, this is not to say that the insects are entering into the relationship with full consent (whatever that might mean in the world of bugs and bees and cigarette trees) and most seem blissfully unaware that they are playing such a crucial role in plant reproduction.

Further, there are instances of male insects being sexually duped by a plant with sex organs that have evolved to look like the female of their species. The insect is attracted not by the pretty colours or the alluring scent of the flower, nor even the promise of a sugary drink, but by the prospect of being able to mate. The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari discuss this in A Thousand Plateaus, with particular reference to the case of an orchid and a wasp. However, they argue that it should be understood in terms of becoming and not in the more conventional terms of mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.

The question remains, however, what this aparallel evolution or game of becoming, has to do with us: how are we implicated in the sex life of flowers? The answer is hay fever. For what is the allergic reaction to pollen suffered by many millions of men, women and children other than a sexually transmitted condition? Every spring we are sexually pestered by flowering plants that promiscuously allow their sperm-producing cells to be carried by any passing breeze into the eyes, ears, nose and throat of any passing creature.

As with herpes, there is presently no cure for hay fever. However, an article in The New Scientist several years ago suggested that 'organic masturbation' with fruit and vegetables might alleviate the problem. It turned out to be an April Fool's Day joke. But, many a word spoken in jest ... The revenge of the flowers starts with a runny nose, but who's to say in what humiliating circumstances it might end?

Of course, not all plant-human penetration is non-consensual. Whilst no one wants a nose full of pollen, many men and women are happy to insert carrots, cucumbers, and courgettes into those places usually reserved for cocks, tongues, fingers, and toys. But just because a woman might choose to insert a banana into her vagina, it doesn’t necessarily mean that she is on the road to building a body without organs, or that she's had done with the judgement of God.

In D. H. Lawrence's novel, Women in Love, the central male protagonist, Rupert Birkin, is a confirmed floraphile, as this scene illustrates:

"He was happy in the wet hill-side, that was overgrown and obscure with bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses [...] then lying down and letting them touch his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself with their contact.
      But they were too soft. He went through the long grass to a clump of young fir-trees [...] The soft sharp boughs beat upon him, as he moved in keen pangs against them, threw little cold showers of drops on his belly, and beat his loins with their clusters of soft-sharp needles. There was a thistle which pricked him vividly, but not too much, because all his movements were too discriminate and soft. To lie down and roll in the sticky, cool young hyacinths, to lie on one's belly and cover one's back with handfuls of fine wet grass, soft as a breath, soft and more delicate and more beautiful than the touch of any woman; and then to sting one's thigh against the living dark bristles of the fir-boughs; and then to feel the light whip of the hazel on one's shoulders, stinging, and then to clasp the silvery birch-trunk against one’s breast, its smoothness, its hardness, its vital knots and ridges - this was good, this was all very good, very satisfying. Nothing else would do, nothing else would satisfy, except this coolness and subtlety of vegetation travelling into one’s blood. How fortunate he was, that there was this lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, waiting for him, as he waited for it; how fulfilled he was, how happy!"

Lawrence continues:

"Really, what a mistake he had made, thinking he wanted people, thinking he wanted a woman. He did not want a woman - not in the least. The leaves and the primroses and the trees, they were really lovely and cool and desirable, they really came into the blood and were added on to him. He was enrichened now immeasurably, and so glad.
      ... Why should he pretend to have anything to do with human beings at all? Here was his world, he wanted nobody and nothing but the lovely, subtle, responsive vegetation, and himself, his own living self.
      It was necessary to go back into the world. That was true. But that did not matter ... He knew now where he belonged. He knew where to plant himself, his seed: – along with the trees, in the folds of the delicious fresh growing leaves. This was his place, his marriage place. The world was extraneous."

It might be suggested that in this extraordinary scene Birkin is in the process of forming a rhizome between himself and the vegetal world, similar to that formed between the wasp and the orchid. It's a deterritorialization of sex from its traditional object and aim; a setting free of desire to roam and eventually reterritorialize on all kinds of new things, in all sorts of strange new ways. The great and intoxicating truth that Birkin demonstrates is that we can form loving relations not just with anyone - but anything and everything.

Admittedly, it's not love in the conventional and orthodox sense of the word, which is to say love that has been sanctioned by God and which involves the right persons doing the right things at the right time in the right place with the right organs - a model that is so restrictive and so reductive that it makes one want to immediately run outside and commit acts of erotic atrocity like Diogenes in the market place.

However, let it suffice for me to point out to those law-abiding individuals who think that love should circulate exclusively within a system of moral legislation, that were it not for Eve daring to consort with serpents and eat of whatever fruit she pleased, then none of us might have attained to carnal knowledge, or experienced the full range of earthly delights. Ultimately, love is tied to transgression and to crime - not to obedience or conformity with social convention.

In fact, one might argue that the highest forms of love are precisely those branded as paraphilias in which strange connections are sought out and one dreams of establishing an inhuman relationship with alien forces, or heterogeneous terms and territories. Quite clearly, Birkin is caught up in a process of becoming-plant via a series of perverse participations none of which involve imitation or identification. It's a question of extracting from his own sex the particles that best enter into proximity with those emitted by the plants and which produce within him a micro-florality.

If usually when we love we do so in order to seek out ourselves, that's almost certainly not the case here. For Birkin is not depositing his sperm amongst the foliage in the same way as he might come inside a woman and one suspects that he isn’t even that concerned with his own functional pleasure or the banality of orgasm. What really excites Birkin, even more than the delicious touch of the plants on his bare skin, is that he might enter into a new way of being and release the flows and forces and strange feelings presently overcoded by his humanity. Or, put more simply, that he might blossom and unfold into his own poppiness.

The problem with having a human being as a lover, is that their body often doesn’t serve to set anything free; rather, it gives impersonal desire personal expression and in this way it acts as a zone of containment, or a point of blockage - a dead end if you like, no matter how you choose to penetrate it. In other words, the anus is a cul-de-sac and, as Bataille reminds us, the vagina is a freshly dug grave.

There is, I admit, something utopian in this belief that we might discover via molecular-desire a new world in which we each contain an infinite number of impersonal selves and the anthropomorphic representation of sex is shattered once and for all: a future in which love will no longer mean boy-meets-girl, but boy becomes-girl, boy becomes-animal, boy becomes-plant, etc. But, even after the orgy, it surely remains true to say that perversions make happy.

This, however, is not to argue that the only way to form an intimate relation between yourself and the world of plants is to roll around naked like Birkin in the wet hill-sides, saturated with a mixture of pollen and semen. Nor does it mean having to masturbate with the contents of your vegetable drawer. For art also serves as a method of becoming and when Van Gogh paints sunflowers "he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower". The canvas acts as a zone of proximity wherein something is exchanged between the two terms: the artist becomes-object, just as the object becomes pure line and colour.

This is the power of painting: it gives us the third thing, which, in this case, is a kind of human-flower hybrid that blossoms in the fourth dimension as a form of perfected relationship and becoming "where no Kodak can snap it". And, for Lawrence, our life hinges upon this relationship formed between ourselves and the world around us. Via an infinite number of different contacts we enter into the kingdom of bliss.

Alas, it’s not easy to come into touch in this way. To form a new relation with the world is invariably painful, if only because it involves the breaking of old connections and loyalties and this, as Lawrence reminds us, is never pleasant. But, nevertheless, we live in bright red splendour like the poppy via acts of infidelity and not by staying true to old attachments like a fat green cabbage forever stuck in the same old cabbage patch.


See:

D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 106-07.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171.

D. H. Lawrence, 'Art and Morality', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, p. 168.

Note: A much longer version of this work was first presented at Treadwell's, London, on 19 June, 2012.


3 Mar 2016

Dementia: From Bad to Verse


People who leave the obscure and try to define 
whatever it is that goes on in their heads, are pigs.

 
Living Words is a therapeutic arts organisation, created in 2007 by the writer Susanna Howard, which works with people - like my mother - who are dealing with dementia and the accompanying loss of speech skills and other neuro-cognitive functions.

The belief is that even the most delirious babbling should be regarded as valid expression and that by recording and faithfully transcribing what is said, you might produce a form of poetry in which the truth of madness, as well as the inner world of the person, is revealed. This, says Howard, is her great mission.

Of course, as she admits, the process involves editing. But, Howard insists, there is nothing added and no meddling; the meaning of the text is present in the utterance of the speaker and simply allowed to shine forth on the page with transparent authenticity.

I am, of course, extremely skeptical about all this - to say the least.

It's not that I think it impossible to establish a dialogue with those who can but stammer imperfect words and noises without fixed syntax, or the recognised logic of language. And I certainly don't wish to abandon anyone to silent oblivion, if they still desperately desire to communicate (although, having said that, I must admit to finding something beautiful in the total silence of the object).

Rather, my main concern is that there's a real danger in the Living Words project of subscribing to the romantic myth of madness; particularly in relation to the (equally romantic) myths of art and creative genius. Howard is profoundly mistaken in believing that every single word or sound that falls from a madman's lips is worthy of respect and only needs to be sculpted by an artist-in-residence in order to produce poetry and truth.

For as Foucault was at pains to point out in the conclusion to his history of insanity in the Age of Reason, whilst the madness of Nietzsche, or Van Gogh, or Artaud belongs to their work, their work does not belong to madness. That is to say, madness is precisely the absence of art and its annihilation; "the point where it becomes impossible and where it must fall silent ..."

Foucault continues:

"Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition ... it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void. ... Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably ..."

And - let's be honest here - the Living Words team are not dealing with figures such as Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud; the poets they encounter in the various hospitals and care homes have very little of any philosophical interest or artistic merit to contribute, be they sane, senile, or somewhere in between.

Of course, not that this really matters: Toute l'écriture est de la cochonnerie.


Notes

Michel Foucault; Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, (Tavistock Publications, 1987). Lines quoted are on p. 287. 

Those interested in knowing more about the Living Words project should click here to visit their website.

Many thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this topic. 


19 Feb 2015

Anyone Can Be Van Gogh With an iPhone

Sunfuckingflower (2015) by Stephen Alexander


Bored, I decided to take a picture of the one cheerful thing in the room: a sunflower. Still bored, even after taking the picture and looking at it for a second or two and wondering at its heart of darkness, I sent it to a friend who is a lover of all things floral.

She replied: "I suppose this proves anyone can be Van Gogh if they have an iPhone."

This struck me as a rather curious remark. One sensed a degree of hostility beneath the irony, although whether this was for me as an amateur snapper or for the specific tool used to capture and send the image, I'm not entirely certain. The remark did, however, remind me of something that D. H. Lawrence once wrote:

"When Van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualise the sunflower far more perfectly than Van Gogh can."

Is this what my friend was, in her own rather mocking manner, trying to hint at? Was she, like Lawrence, seeking to defend the fourth dimensional aspect of an artwork; i.e. that magical quality which remains incommensurable with the painter, the object, or the technology involved in creating a visual image?

Perhaps. Otherwise, she's just being sarky ...!


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171. 

Note: No ears were mutilated in the production of the above image.

 

 

25 Mar 2014

All Hail the New Flesh! (On D. H. Lawrence's Impure Pictures)

D. H. Lawrence: The Rape of the Sabine Women (1928)


D. H. Lawrence's great faith is in the flesh, to which he makes an insistent appeal throughout his writings. 

His paintings too, as critic Keith Sagar rightly points out, were a bold - not entirely successful - attempt to capture something of the meaty reality of the body and to make manifest the invisible flows that model and shape the flesh, sometimes cruelly, via a non-representational depiction of their effects. 

But Sagar is mistaken to think of this, as he does, in terms of an art of human anatomy. For in attempting to paint the fleshiness of the body and its forces, Lawrence does everything he can do to paint out those personal and ideal (all too human) aspects which overcode the corpo/real and establish the familiar hierarchical structures of the organism.

Lawrence does not wish to reduce his figures to the level of optical cliché; he is not trying to capture a likeness! Rather, he's attempting to express an objective (albeit intuitional) perception of substance. His painting is therefore, if nothing else, consciously post-Impressionist; a refusal, as he puts it, to be transmuted into the purity of light and colour.   

On occasion, it might be said (somewhat generously) that Lawrence almost pulls off what it is he believes only Cézanne amongst the moderns has achieved and what he terms appleyness - that is to say, the partial revealing of the thingliness of the thing, be it a piece of fruit, a wooden table, or the body of a naked woman.

However, at other times his less-than-subtle attempt to rub our faces in the obscene beauty of the flesh via a continuous parade of ample breasts, round buttocks, and giant limbs simply becomes tiring. Only one of his paintings is called Close-Up, but many of them lack what is usually considered appropriate perspective and their shocking character lies precisely in this as much as the actual content (as Lawrence was well aware).

His Rape of the Sabine Women, for example, ironically fails for much the same reason that he suggests Van Gogh's landscapes fail; too wilful and too much of a surging assault upon our sensibilities. Of course there's a certain comic aspect to this particular picture (made clear by the alternative title suggested by Lawrence: A Study in Arses), but this unfortunately fails to compensate for its somewhat repulsive subjectivity. 

This is not to say that painting shouldn't be joyous and even a little vulgar. Nor is it to argue that there is no place for ugliness and obscenity in art. Indeed, as Deleuze points out, it is never enough simply to reveal the flesh, one must ultimately push it in the direction of deformation and disfiguration, producing monsters and abstraction - and monsters of abstraction - in the process.

25 Jan 2014

On Van Gogh's Ear and the Dangers of Sungazing

Picture by Phischer: Van Gogh's Ear (2007)
www.worth1000.com

Although the facts of the case were disputed in 2009 by two revisionist art historians looking to pin the blame on Gauguin, we all know the story of Van Gogh's mutilated ear and how he carefully wrapped the piece of severed lobe in newspaper before presenting it to his favourite prostitute, Rachel, at a nearby brothel, with instructions to carefully look after it.  

Very few of us, however, have bothered to place this story in a wider context of meaning; and no one has managed to do a better job of this than Georges Bataille in his 1930 essay on acts of sacrificial atrocity and solar-induced madness.

Bataille persuasively argues that Van Gogh's violent act of self-disfigurement was the result not of a tiff with Gauguin, but due to an inhuman and ultimately overwhelming relationship maintained with the sun; a fatal form of worship that is only fully revealed in the painter's canvases produced during his stay at the mental hospital in Saint-Rémy in 1889 (i.e. following the Christmas Eve ear incident).

Vincent's letters to his brother Theo written during this period, also indicate how his solar obsession had reached its peak; he felt that he and the sun - at which he stared for dangerously long-periods at a time as if he himself were a sunflower drawing nourishment directly from the latter - were burning with the same vital intensity and magnificence.

After his departure from Saint-Rémy in January 1890, the sun doesn't simply fade or set within his artwork, but, crucially, almost entirely disappears. Six-months later, Van Gogh takes his own life, aged 37.

The point is this: it is impossible to maintain a personal or safe relationship with the sun; the attempt to do so might promise enlightenment and a healthy tan, but it ends with death and dismemberment. For just as sun-gazers risk solar retinopathy, sun-lovers risk being proved fatally mistaken in their anthropomorphic conceit if they believe that the sun loves them in return.


Note: See Georges Bataille, 'Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh', in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1985).