By now, you must know my weakness for Cranach’s paintings, for his depictions of the seductiveness of the female body, his wonderful view on Eve. I am lucky. London’s Royal Academy of Arts is hosting a major exhibition of his work, which includes a fair amount of Venuses. Five centuries later, Cranach continues to shock and contradict, as the poster for the exhibition was almost pulled out from advertising spots on the London underground. Is it really that outrageous? what is it about the image that is uncomfortable to show? The nudity or the look? I wonder…

These images have influenced so many others… The first I can think of is Tizian’s Venus of Urbino, almost its contemporary, although less defiant. Then there’s Manet’s Olympia, of course. I recently attended ArtSheffield 08. Like when in Venice, I enjoyed the social aspect more than the art. There was one piece, however, at the interesting Millennium Galleries display, that broke the indistinguishable continuum I felt reigned over the other spaces. A look was at its centre, although this time, the figure was a man, fully clothed.

This image of Morrissey by Wolfgang Tillmans showed me, tracing it back to Cranach, that the challenge resides in the look, much more than in the pose, in the nudity, in the political stance of the images. The look, the gaze… Always them, at the centre of works of art…

Isn’t Donnie Darko an amazing film? Such a beautiful portrayal of unconscious processes, 80s music (Love will tear us apart…), paranoic behaviour, teenage love, phantasy, trauma, the hope of therapy, the imaginary, the social bond, educational philosophies and politics, and science fiction. It’s so inspiring, I could watch it over and over again (I mean, Grandma Death!). There is also a link to be made between Donnie Darko and Inland Empire, with its exploration of the unconscious and the rabbits… When I am done with this bit of research I am engaged in, I should return to explore this. Does anyone know good books/papers I shouldn’t miss?

Hannah Wilke, detail of Chewing Gum

From the John Moores 24 Exhibition of contemporary painting 2006, at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool:

Jeff McMillan, The Seducer, Oil on found painting, 51 x 61.5cm, 2005

Artist Statement

For many years I have collected second-hand oil paintings from boot sales and thrift shops. These form a curious compendium of subjects and styles. It’s only in the last couple of years that this collection has made its way into my studio to become a material part of the work.

In this way I want to acknowledge the cannibalistic perversity of making a painting at this nihilistic point in history while at the same time using this viscous, highly chromatic medium to attempt to create a thing of beauty.

Elaine Brown, Lace and snake’s skin, Oil on gesso on boards, 46 x 30cm, 2005

Artist Statement

My paintings fall into the genre of still life. I am interested in the way an object can become resonant with meaning. The desire to fix the ephemeral nature of memories and emotional attachments underlies the work. Drawn to things which are inherently symbolic - personally or collectively - painting presents the place where, intuitively and deliberately, through assembly and depiction, I can manipulate their interpretations and create a scenario.

‘Lace and Snake‚Äôs Skin’ is a diptych although each panel could exist alone. Seen together they are unified by the gaze of the viewer. I have kept both objects for some years - placed in similar territories there are many parallels and polarities that draw them together and pull them apart.

Reflection
I see, experience and recognize recognize seduction in the second one of these artworks, even though the first painting, according to its title and the artist’s statement, deals with the seducer explicitly. I have been reading about art and the act on unveiling and wonder whether McMillan’s painting deals with the act-game of hidding and revealing in a direct way: a found painting is dipped in yellow oil pain, covering most of it; the painting is them, for all I can see, exhibited upside down. The viewer is faced with a series of obstacles that are tangible, identifiable.

Elaine Brown’s dyptich, however, is more subtle. The relationshp between the two paintings is not clear and neither is the arrangement of the polymorphous objects she chose (lace and snake skin). Like a Rorschach inkblot test, they could be read in a veriety of ways. I saw breats in the first one, that first and foremost object of desire, and the fact that the painting depicted lace only helped to reinforced by mental image. The second one didn’t lend itself to any specific object but was imbued with a sense of danger, something self-destructive. A snake embodying the devil was the first seducer.

In both of them, whether explicit or not, there is a veil drawn, a veil waiting to be lifted by the viewer. But these two veils are very different. Could it be that male and female seductions are different?

Metro, Thusday 20 July 2006

This is excellent news! I suppose this means that, if I was in two minds about attending my third Biennale, Felix might have swayed the lever into the yes position.

I want to paste this quote from the magnificent K-Punk journal because I suspect I am going to want to refer to it later:

Deleuze proclaims that the ‘only enemy is two’. He understoods perfectly well that a split is involved but is unable to grant any ontological specificity to the concept of the split, and rushes to reduce it to a dualism: ‘the source of dualism, it seems to me… is this flattening of all statements of thought, precisely, by this speculative, Oedipal apparatus in which the statement, on the one hand, is related to the subject, to a subject, and on the other hand, and simultaneously, the subject is split into a subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation.’ (By contrast with Deleuze, the Irigarayan concept of the ‘not one’ - with its Imaginary figuration as the lips which are neither one nor two - does grant ontological consistency to the split.) Perhaps we can oppose the Lacanian spaltung to the Deleuzian ‘between’; whereas the between takes its place in the interstitial gap between unities, the spaltung breaks unities into less than one (there is no possibility of unification) and more than one (the subject is always doubled, which is not to say dual).

The split (Lacanian, Deleuzian and Irigarayan) is a subject that fascinates me as it defies logic, mathematics and even dialectics. “1??2=1″ is a seductive thought, in the same way as the luxury equation, developped by Sally Mara, alias Raymond Queneau (”1+1=32″), leads thoughts astray. An enigma (like the analyst); a teaser; a riddle (like the “even” in The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even) ‚Äîperhaps a product of appearances as well‚Äî is what keeps my desire for knowledge (all desire is a desire for knowledge) in constant flow.

Please remember, before attempting to write anything on seduction:
1. Seduction is a relational enterprise;
2. Seduction invokes the possibility of a change, from positive to negative;
3. Seduction may lead me astray in my efforts to theorise, research, examine, explore;
4. Seduction will resist any mode of production;
5. Seduction (first order simulacra) is what my research is about. Not attraction, fascination or any other third and fourth order simulacra.

La seduccion de los objetos / The seduction of objects
Farruggia, Nazario, Creciente
Publisher: Embajada de Canada
ISBN: 987-43-6600-1
Size: 17,5 X 26 cm.
Language: Spanish
Pages: 180

Also, this wonderful website. What has this project got to do with seduction?