Titian, nymph and shepherd is even more dear to me because it also contains a letter to me, one written in its second and third pages (it is a long letter) by my brother. I keep all the personal letters I have received (not the cards, letters are usually not cards. I have even written conference papers in the form of letters, plan to write my PhD conclusion as a letter to my examiners and asked students to write them, to anyone, to everyone, to their perplexity… I think about letters almost constantly but this little reflexion on how much they mean to me started after reading Belen’s story. She had been teasing us on the forum, saying she had a story to tell about letter and, when she told it, it was as wonderful as an astonishing sunset. You know what I mean, a mini sublime. Belen and I used to share a studio when we studied for our Bachelor’s degree in Spain. We shared thoughts, meals, books. We expanded to the small community that El Guindo has become today. We shared a baffling but charming sculpture teacher who showed us to love Lacan and, above all John Berger. We couldn’t get enough. At lunch, we would sit under our cherry tree (el guindo), eating soup and croquettes while we read our favourite And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. We would buy his novels to our boyfriends and let them into our private circle only if they passed the initiation rite of having read them AND loved them. Well, Belen was going through a rough patch a couple of years ago. She was in Madrid, where Berger was exhibiting (he takes photographs, like many of us) and something within her made her write him a letter telling him the lot. After that, she thought nothing more of it. Maybe it did not even get to him. Then, earlier this week, she revealed in El Guindo that he had replied to her with a short, handwritten message, the end of the note bidding her farewell in Spanish, her mother tongue. HE HAD REPLIED. The dream of every letter writer is to get a reply. Belen’s story made me think that, a letter is only second to a kiss.

Art comes from life. Art comes from the problem you have in seducing birds, men, snakes — anything you want. It is like a Corneille tragedy, where everybody is pursuing somebody else. You like A, and A likes D, and D likes… Being a daughter of Voltaire and having an education in the eighteenth-century rationalists, I believe that if you work enough, the world is going to get better. If I work like a dog on all these contraptions, I am going to get the bird I want… [yet] the end result is rather negative. That’s why I keep going. The resolution never appears; it’s like a mirage. I do not get the satisfaction — otherwise I would stop and be happy. (pp.161-162)

From On Beauty: a conversation with Bill Beckley, on the same book:

As my brain experiences the duality of subjective and objective, my sense of beauty swings between the two. I refuse to choose. I am a woman of emotion who still pines to be a woman of rationality. I am torn between the two, and I have learned to accept them both. To seduce is a harmonious merger of the two, and it is the greatest art of all. Sculpture, which is my raison d’être, is motivated by my obsessive, unsuccessful attempts to seduce.

Uncontrollable beauty is in the effort to seduce one through my sculpture. It is le désir de plaire. Art comes from the inability to seduce. I am unable to make myself loved. I am still motivated by an attraction to “the other,” which is a mysterious beauty. Seduction is a form of convincing. I am the indefatigable seducer. Beauty is the pursuit of “the other”. (pp. 357-358)

This made me thing of Jean-Michel Rabaté’s work on Étant Donnés and the Black Dahlia:

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The life of the artist is the denial of sex. Art comes from the inability to seduce. I am unable to make myself be loved. The equation is really sex and murder, sex and death

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The fear of sex and death is the same. Attraction and fear move back and forth. Which is the cause and which is the effect? It’s important to know.

Turenne was standing on his horse ready to go to battle. He said to his horse, which was really his unconscious, “You tremble, carcass, but you would tremble even more if you knew where I am going to take you.”

It is at this moment, the thrill of danger, that the erotic impulse is activated. The thrill is an erotic presence, that all-or-nothing feeling. You either resist or let go. If it terrorizes you, it means the resistance is too much. There is the refusal to go to battle with the unconscious. I become paralized by the fear.

In a woman, sex comes when she loses control. In a man, it comes from asserting his control. In sex you lose control and it can be terrifying. By extension, the relationship of Turenne to his horse is an S & M image. Turenne was the artist. The artist is a sadist and afraid of his own sadism, of inflicting death. Is it murder or suicide? It depends on how you feel. Think of the bird ensnared by the snake. Nobody has ever proved that the bird suffers from his fear. Who says that the bird doesn’t enjoy it, that there’s not a sexual thrill? That there’s not ecstasy in death? That the bird dies fulfilled, as he’s gobbled up. One way or the other, the ransom of fear is death.

Don’t forget that the masochist loves a sadist and the sadist loves a masochist, and the prisoner is so helpless and desperate that all he has left is to fall in love with the jailer. (pp. 228-229)

One plus side of the formal approach was embodied by one of the keynote speakers, who I was eager to see as I may have wanted to ask for their expertise on one aspect of my project. The thing is that the speaker, who I did not know what they may look like, appeared with the most fascinating haircut I have ever seen. I won’t describe it here as I am very diplomatic and more information would be telling. But what I can say is that it was very appropriate to the face in question, albeit being a bit scary. It changed with movement, sometimes drastically and it had me under a spell for the duration of the address. I am not sure now if I may be able to ever overcome the hair if I worked with them! Is this seduction?

Other than that, my weekend in London was spent talking to friends, catching up on food, getting rained on, catching cabs, left-right-an-centre, attending private views, being introduced to people, stepping on people’s feet with my ubiquitous wheel-y suitcase (it was Halloween) and seeing shows.

Of those, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall deserves a mention. The premise if that you are in the Turbine Hall in 2058 (hence the title T.H 2058). It was been raining forever and this has had an effect of various sculptures, which have mysteriously grown. Living is difficult and the space in Tate has been converted into a refugee camp, with colourful bunk-beds. Some cultural artefacts have been saved too: the handful of overgrown sculptures mentioned, a few books, and bits of film footage. Here I am, trying to watch the mesmerising fragments:

It was raining outside when we went and people were up for a bit of shelter and dipping in and out of books. Despite the desolate effect, it was cosey-er than outside, so people made themselves at home. I observed them. Some were able to perch themselves in the metal frames in a way that made me wonder whether they intimately new the furniture. And then, there were the artefacts, interesting choices. My highlight was finding on the list El Mal de Montano by Vila-Matas. V for Vendetta was also there and my comprehensive and systematic search could not get hold of a copy in that space. Do they have problems with art kleptomania?

It was fascinating as it highlighted art’s power to think and to predict. What would I have saved in my end of the world piece? As much as I would like to, I think Étant Donnés would perish, wither because of the rain (or any other catastrophe), or the inability to be dismantled; so I am going to settle for this. And you, what would you rescue from eternal oubli brought about by the end of the world as we know it?

Traumfrauen: Haus der Photographie in den Deichtorhallen, Hamburg 20.09.08 – 09.11.08

More information here, here and here (all in German). Traumfrauen… Dream women… Trauma

Images: Albert Watson, Breaunna Las Vegas Hilton, 2001 / Miles Aldridge, Homeworks, 2008 / Dan Martensen, “Looking out the window”, from “LowLuv”, Los Angeles, 2005 / Donna Trope, Mood 1, Jodie Kidd, London 1998-2008 / Glen Luchford, Freja, New York April 2008 / Greg Delves, White Hood 1, Alek Wek, long Island, 1997 / Marc Hom, Amy Winehouse, 2007 / Marc Hom, Louise Bourgeois, 1998 / Marc Hom, Sofia Coppola, 1998 / Max Vadukul, Audrey Tatou, Paris 2008 / Michael Thompson, Pulling Lid, New York 1993 / Michelangelo di Battista, Nibelungen, Paris 2002 / Miles Aldridge, Homeworks #3, 2008 / Miles Aldridge, Homeworks, 2008 / Peter Lindbergh, Giorgia Frost (links), Romina Lanaro (rechts), Italian Vogue, Downtown Los Angeles 2006 / Ralph Mecke, Lou Doillon, Paris 2004 / Sheryl Nields, Scarlett Johansson, Sun Valley, Los Angeles 2006 / Torkil Gudnason, Untitled, New York, 2007

The Sartorialist is one of the regular blogs I read/look at. To me Scott Schuman’s work is a real celebration of garments, objects, people and how they construct their identities. His work is astonishing. The close ups, people’s faces, the way they fill in, or not, the clothes they are wearing, their nationality, their beliefs through what they choose… And the backgrounds, of course, where they are located, where they happen to be…There is, of course, also some August Sander in his sociological approach.

Schuman started photographing around 2005, when he had left a high powered job in men’s fashions to take care of his daughter. He learned by photographing his children and afterwards, he began to record outfits worn by people on the streets who captured his imagination. Self-taught and self-reliant, just like one of my favourite film directors, Julio Medem.

And then there are the mistakes, the experiments where something happens, like the one above, where, instead of being a still portrait, it is a moving portrait, but in the same vein than vintage Sartorialist. The same elements I outlined above are relevant but with a little of the unexpected, of the more natural, or the unplanned, un-posed.

Look at the image above, though. It is a one-off moment. Where did that blue envelope come from and how come it is of the same shade than the light behind. Isn’t the lady’s dress just perfect. And the smoking hand framed by the red canopy (a red that offsets the blue)? I could look at this images forever, in the same way I can look at Francesca Woodman’s ‘On Being an Angel’, or my image of the shoe.

There is something about the frame, about the composition, about what is in the frame and what isn’t, what we can imagine, what is chosen not to be shown. I think this is what photography can capture/do than no other medium can.

Patricia Arquette as Renee Madison and Alice Wakefield in David Lynch’s Lost Highway

Dita Von Teese, pinup star, burlesque performer and muse of Agent Provocateur, photographed by Perou

The image of former Ukranian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, certainly feels like finding a palm tree in the desert. With her hair (which she had to demonstrate was real), her symetric face and her dress sense, she breaks the continuum of political / parlamentary life. At the same time, she infuses it with an unsettling, slightly gothic element that perverts the greay suit qualities of its environment. Just look at the dress…

Seductive? Possibly. Especially if seduction estems from a particular way of being itself…