subversive intent.

the same evening i made the mistake of going to see baal, i discovered a tiny, used bookstore across the street. the bookstore, which keeps irregular hours and is a disarray of books piled high upon one another with no seeming order and no system, happened to have it's light on. i went inside. the owner talked loudly on the phone, sitting closely to the door and spoke bitterly of the debts he owed. when i happened to glance the title subversive intent: gender, politics, and the avant-garde, i had no problem handing over the last $16.50 in my wallet.

i put off reading it for a month or two, having been published in 1990, it wasn't on the top of my to-read pile. i mistakenly thought that feminist politics had come a long way since 1990. i was wrong.



as suleiman points out, "like modern capitalism, modern patriarchy has a way of assimilating any number of potentially subversive gestures into the mainstream, where whatever subversive energy they may have possessed becomes neutralized." so, really, how far have we come in twenty years? feminist texts have increased, words like cunt or pussy have beem reclaimed, and we have demanded recognition in our fields and our political actions. yet, so many of us women still feel a deep discontent in current movements and academia.

suleiman writes of the surrealists and their lack of representation of women within the movement until the later stages when surrealism was dying (noting that movements and academia fail to let women into their discourse until they are truly struggling or at their end) and breton's nadja - a semi-autobiographical account of breton's relationship with "mad" woman. in contrast to nadja, suleiman cites the ravishing of lol v stein by duras as an essential text to the feminist movement and criticizes it's marginality compared to breton's novel. i'm impressed by suleiman as she explores women, madness, and the narrative of the texts through freudian psychoanalysis.

in short, by exploring freud's desire for "narrative mastery" when writing of dora and his seeming blindness and unconscious desire to manipulate the story, suleiman contrasts duras' writing to breton's writing. both texts are told from the viewpoint of a male, somewhat haphazard in their retelling. however, since duras writes from a female point of view she is able to direct the reader to understand the sanity behind the seeming madness of lola stein whereas both breton and freud found their protagonists completely mad and attributed their madness to somewhat phantasmagorical, or atleast fantastical, narratives that the men created.

having just learned of duras' work when i read suleiman, i immediately checked out the ravishing of lol v stein from the edendale branch of the los angeles public library system and finished it in one day. i must admit, it was rather disappointing. i'd hoped for so much more from a french novel written in the 60's. especially since suleiman used this particular text to dismiss freud and breton, i expected something much more radical than what reads like a romance novel but not nearly as raunchy.

this brings me back to my point. could duras' writing have been marginalized because breton's writing is more exciting, more spectacular. i, myself, was more drawn to breton's writing. duras' novel seems much more toned down in comparison.

is this why there are fewer female philosophers and theorists than male?

are radical ideologies and concepts presented by women dismissed as madness whereas the men are applauded?

baal.

can we just talk about how awful this play is for a second? baal, the play by bertolt brecht, is based on a wretched poet that is an outright misogynist -er, i mean a seducer of women - that rejects bourgeois society. granted brecht wrote this play as a twenty year old student in 1918. but is it any excuse for an ensemble, nearly a century later, to reenact this play without atleast making some alterations to update it for a contemporary audience?

this isn't one of brecht's more refined pieces of writing.

and, so, when i happened to make the mistake of going to see this at my local theater ensemble group's playhouse (which will remain nameless so as to avoid undue embarrassment on their behalf), i was utterly horrified. the actor portraying baal, overplayed his role to the point of nausea. he sputtered his sentences, with dribbles of spit flying across the room, and even had the audacity to look me square in the eye and call me a "bitch". let me tell you mr. overcompensation, i didn't plan on seeing your penis twice that night but i can understand your desire to overplay your role to make up for what you lacked below.

the women in this play were weak, submissive, stereotypical, raped versions of the women who were a part of the first wave feminist movement. ironically, brecht wrote this play in the same year that marie stopes published "married love", the first book that reflected on a woman's sexual desire. don't get me wrong, stopes had her own issues involving eugenics claiming that those "unfit" for parenthood should be forced into sterilization. but, at the very least, she founded marie stopes international as a support group for sexual health advocacy.

back to brecht. brecht's attempt to provoke self-reflection in order to recognize injustice so that the audience can have an epiphany and change the world is a misguided rationalization that allows him to exploit gender stereotypes in baal. darling brecht, your concept of "epic theater" is great in theory, but not quite adequate on the stage here in los angeles. we can, of course, blame it on an outdated script or in the way the actors played their roles...but we shouldn't allow it to become an excuse to not explore postmodern options of using a female as the lead or investigating other subversive techniques.

the anti-aesthetic & pastiche...

The Anti-Aesthetic, Essays on Postmodern Culture. Have you read it? You should. Contributors include Baudrillard, Jameson, Owens, and Said.

Jameson's essay relates his ideas on postmodernism and consumer society. Back in 1982, when this essay was originally part of a talk at the Whitney Museum, postmodernism - he claims - was not even widely accepted, or understood. I shudder to think, postmodernism which now provides us with such fluidity and allows us to resist rigid formulaic confines. But to postmodernism, Jameson attributes two significant features: pastiche and schizophrenia. I'll bypass Jameson's explanation of the breakdown of signifiers in schizophrenia and focus on pastiche.

Now pastiche should not be confused with parody, as parody intends to mock the original and pastiche intends to mimic. Pastiche, we are told, is blank parody. And is utterly destructive. If we follow this logic, artists in a postmodern society are only creating imitations of dead styles. Jameson writes:

"as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. but if this is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself - or at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history."

Jameson's theory triggers reflections on photography. The digital camera, we thought, killed film. But film is nostalgic and the desire for 35mm or 120mm is still strong - except now it is only for those who can afford to pay, just as it was during the advent of photography. We see the increased popularity of Lomography, or Lo-fi photography, that often results in eerie and nostalgic photographs (see Liad Cohen photography, below)...


We regard the work of Sally Mann with appreciation and awe. We admire her wet plate collodion process, though done today reflects the aura of the past.

But it does not end with photography, we are reminded of our past through nostalgia film, through artistic recreations, through manipulations in photoshop. Has our past been commodified, a socialization mediated by images of a previous existence as our present existence is meaningless? If this is true, then the Situationists foreshadowed our demise in the 1960's. We exist in a Society of the Spectacle. The Spectacle, that is, reconstructs itself through pastiche and our world/present, as Guy DeBord wrote, can no longer be grasped directly.

art and fear.

I originally picked up Art and Fear because of the cover art, an x-ray of the back of a skull with tiny, splotches of red paint. I never figured out who was the artist responsible for the cover art, but I did end up engrossed in Paul Virilio's short critique of aesthetics and politics. I was more attracted to his first essay, "A Pitiless Art," which explores the nature of contemporary art after Auschwitz, than "Silence on Trial," which focuses more on multimedia performances. I have mixed feelings about multimedia performances. Virilio's exploration of multimedia art focuses on hyperviolence and hypersexuality that lead to the eventual dismantling of human feeling. However, it is not my desire to critique multimedia art at length here.

What I am more interested in is Virilio's examination of the artist as the terrorist in "A Pitiless Art." He begins this essay with a direct reference to the aesthetics of Auschwitz by recounting the experiences of Jacqueline Lichenstein, a French art historian, who compares her experience at the Museum of Auschwitz to a contemporary art museum where "looking at exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children's toys...[she] suddenly had the impression [she] was in a museum of contemporary art." From the Situationists to abstract art, Virilio expounds that contemporary art has become the executioner. History has ushered us along a path toward dehumanization where the artist dissects humanity and is rewarded for it through recognition. The audience becomes thirsty for tragedy and identifies tragedy as beautiful. This is the same tragedy created by terror, the terror created by the artists/terrorists.

To pick up where Virlio left off, fast forward a few years...

During an interview with author Tom McCarthy, in the recent issue of Bidoun, he speaks of "a terror that is beautiful." He recalls a conversation with David Cerny who exclaims that the planes should not have exploded but dumped their fuel and just been stuck in the tower. Cerny "had a purely aesthetic take on it, and the political dimension was utterly irrelevant to him." This would be the same Cerny that painted the tank pink in Prague and replicated an image of Saddam Hussein and submerged the image in a formaldehyde tank. (Granted he did this as a parody of Damien Hirst's work, but nonetheless still political.)


Contemporary artists work in a Post-Auschwitz and Post-9/11 (un)reality. Art as influenced by post-modern society has undoubtedly added elements of terror and shock to it's repertoire. Yet, even terror and shock fade and we are not so alarmed to see contemporary art museums and galleries that remind us of holocaust museums. We are not disturbed to see artists like Zachary Drucker lie on a table and direct "viewers...through a series of breathing exercises, visions, and traumas, while participants pluck hair from the androgynous, stripped body of the artist."

The audience has been desensitized. The audience thinks we live in a society that has long been dissecting human bodies.