Joy, Jouissance, Journal: the “doing” of collage.

“The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do” – Roland Barthes.

Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912.

Joy, Jouissance, Journal: the “doing” of collage.

Organsing a collage for family brought the simplest pleasure. I was reminded of a lecture that suggested a collage torn piece with the lettering Jou suggested joy or playfulness, a game as well as Le Journal. My lecturer reframed Picasso’s collage Still Life with Chair Caning, oil cloth 1912 and presented the frame: A game? Caning suggests for some, from catholic school to public education, discipline and chastisement for wrongdoing. Until it was seen as child abuse, the cane brought many literally to their knees for a bare back side whip or a rap across the knuckles (often a ruler). Chair caning, or the chairness of the chair has the bottom in mind for socialising, resting, eating and playing board games. The essential use of a chair, to sit and communicate with others or to solitary enjoyment has been fragmented: the still life reveals partial life and beyond my own, my grasp and my chair. The caning is familiar from my childhood; we had those chairs with a dark wooden stain. They remind me of family gatherings, celebrations and stillness walking by and seeing them under the table, waiting for use and out of the way or my path walking by. The pattern is familiar. 

As I sat tearing pieces of paper from a magazine for others to use I felt joy: the sound of tearing, gentle and low coupled with the ripping from my fingers was mindfulness in motion. I tried the collage and the game extended to the application of paper, glue and fast fingers onto cardboard. The rhythm caught in ‘doing” took me out of time, out of my day and the simple joy I felt was unusual at that moment.

Reading the newspaper for Picasso is different from today’s social media and access to a variety of platforms all-at-once. The sound of pages turning, just like ripping has gone. Mimicked sound on devices is not the same. The cerebral connection between black smudged newsprint on thumbs and finger tips with the engagement of rustling large papers and stories – engaging, personal interest or simply read on a Sunday afternoon has changed.Swiping pages opens doors – no more wiping fingers and I can read on the treadmill, listen to podcasts walking and don’t need to sit and manually turn a page. The game has changed. The Journal and way to journal has also changed. This transition into technology has altered collage: I can make a digital one instead. Pieces fit and colours can dim, blend, or simply change. No need to cruise papers and magazines for an eye catching connection with a misprint, colour, advertisement. Google can do that just as well as photo APPs.

Roland Barthes’ The pleasure of the text, (1973) presents some with a “rich tapestry of ideas” connected with the body: the body enjoys, experiences and reads the text for pleasure. Barthes’ writing examines the way we can explore contradictions, silences, sounds and rhythms through spoken and written texts: the joy that reading can offer! My collage offered a mindful or automatic approach to a moment, like unbottling the sea something flowed out unpredictable and unmanaged. If you have ever been confronted (and quite aggressively more like walking into a brick wall than an opening filled with curiosity, discussion and disagreements with acceptance) with the comment “Read it and weep” this moment and memories of reading Barthes re-writes and reframes the conflict: feeling small joys alleviates more wrongs. Processing and “doing” becomes enjoyable with spontaneous, unplanned moments like collage. And, to finish my comment through the silences and rhythms that tearing revealed, my thoughts about Picasso and a lecture coupled with collage preparation and “doing” unfolded with a memorable quote from Barthes:

“The text is a system suspended between desire and its destruction, between production and the silence of disappearance” – The Pleasure of the Text (1973).

Roland Barthes (first published 1973). The Pleasure of the Text. 

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Taking another look: the marvellous in debate and seeing again: Brook Andrew’s illuminated arrow Warrang.

Paul Klee. Separation in the Evening. 1922.

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”

― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

Taking another look: the marvellous in debate and seeing again.

The title “Separation in the Evening” 1992 by Paul Kee attracted my attention. Recently I visited the MCA and considered the contemporary illuminated “arrow” by Brook Andrew, for me, looking up at the Emu Dreaming is looking down at the landscape, sacred ground hidden beneath the grass and concrete of the building – once the Maritime board (1939 commissioned for design / building) Sydney MCA. The architectural style, art-deco inspired, reminds me of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis revealing the above ground world and the shady, underground: the criminal hidden elements in Lang’s Metropolis and M become the architecture, the way we occupy spaces and are manipulated and manoeuvred through those spaces to “see” certain views and viewpoints. Klee’s Separation in the Evening is often used as a tint and tonal exploration for art students (young ones). The layers and separation through shade, tone and tint are, for me, architectural. Like sandstone blocks the  lines and texture reveal a hidden depth: the separation (the title) hides or conceals that depth or that which needs to be close but doesn’t know how or is prevented through architecture and ways of seeing. Is there a matching arrow we can’t see that is hidden beneath the MCA? Or, like Klee’s evening, are the murky waters of the harbour trying to turn us around and see?

The arrows point down or up, like a reflection in a night water or harbour. What is reflected is Andrew’s illuminated arrow is also what is concealed or denying reflection: the emu, the sacred ground as well as the convict and colonial past now hidden in broken or fragmented Dreaming stories. Like Philosophy, some believe is a conversation looking back and questioning Plato and Socrates art too is a conversation between artists and ways of seeing – privileged and gifted for reframing in the present. I stumbled into this conversation thinking of Brook Andrew’s arrow and Paul Klee’s title. I now open this stumbling with some illumination from Water Benjamin’s writings, especially concerning interpretation and the “marvellous” feeling – not unproblematically (a philosopher might question my borrowing of this concept when it hints at the ultimate meaning of “reality”) – art can offer when no-one agrees and the conversation arouses discuss, debate and some warmth from the fire that glows with lighting the forgotten, or shaded artworks that are often walked past, overlooked or displayed as an entrance to discover something else. 

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

Mrs. Lowry and Son, 2019, director Adrian Noble.

Mrs Lowry and Son, 2019, director Adrian Noble.

I knew nothing about L.S Lowry prior to watching this film. I still don’t claim to be an expert, like some I watched with. They knew all – from the film and other articles – they made their claim. This knowledge was theirs: they knew. I sat silently listening to them. I was silenced by the film, not by their knowledge. I felt strange. L.S. Lowry was painted in a light that was grey and sensitive. His mother, insensitive to his existence, abused and neglected him. He remained loyal, looking after her – is this care? I wandered off from the chatter, and thought about care. What if I was bedridden, who would take care of me and how would it be done? The cruelty that was and became the life L.S Lowry on film was difficult. Feminist theory has argued that women need re-education and care to change and develop away from the financial dependence that patriarchy had imposed. Some feminists suggest that men need the education and the impossibility, like Shirley Valentine suggests, marriage is “like peace in the Middle East: There is no solution”. The mother-son relation was seen, through my eyes, a pleasure for the mother to feel touched when her hair was brushed and flattered into a childish stupor when a neighbour paid her attention. This girlish performance of admiration and adoration was short lived.

Mrs Lowry complained of her middle class upbringing and the shame of living “working class” (and on borrowed, creditors money for these complaints!) She belittled and demoralised her deceased husband and son. She ranted that she never wanted a son or child. SHe abused him for his need to paint what he saw: factories, stooped workers dressed in grey and their stories. She abused him for this obscenity to her sensibility: sailing boats, once admired by the neighbour, became the focal point. Dirty factories and ugly portraits were as shameful as his poor position in the workforce. Mrs Lowry didn’t – in the film – connect with her son and his diversity: art was not a hobby. Art was who he was and how he experienced his world. His mother wanted him to see a doctor for this appeal and self-expression. I didn’t claim to know like those around me “knew”. I felt the director and writer offered me a path to feel empathy for an artist and their struggles within their family and with society. For this knowledge, the gift of connecting with someone, was important. I couldn’t know L.S. Lowry or claim this. I did feel angry that someone was treated this way because of wealth and class. I did connect with his feelings of invalidation: the cruel anxiety that the mother threw away from herself at him through harsh, critical words to set herself in a place above him and of authority was something I have researched in education, the arts, and through psychology research.

Mrs Lowry reminded me of a lecture about generalised anxiety: how this impacts on the way people believe they are being viewed by others and their reality. Often distorted, generalised anxiety locks people up – metaphorically – in their homes and away from gatherings because of anxiety. They don’t enjoy public speaking and they find relief through avoidance. Mrs Lowry locked her son up in her own class anxiety. Instead of going outside and simply enjoying a day – beyond class distinctions there’s always the sunshine or feeling of rain or interacting with a milkman or butcher. Mrs Lowry chose to demoralise all of these. What did she fear the most? Looking like a poorer woman or not having the civil awareness to interact with people as humans? I saw her as a cruel, fear filled woman ageing in her bed and delighting only in the touch of her son. Her loneliness was cruel. Her class upbringing made her this cold, and lonely. 

Posthumously, L.S Lowry was offered a Knighthood and he turned it down. Unlike most who enjoy the fame and spotlight, the film offered us some insight: his mother was no longer living so he didn’t need to accept the gesture. He painted what he saw: the outside world is what I have briefly noticed in his artwork. Factories, red doors and stooped people dressed in blacks and greys. Head down, walking, moving, not leisurely resting. Leisure time was not present in his paintings. Or was the walk something more for this class of workers? Did some, like him, have another life we can’t know beyond the soot, the debt and their stoop?

© Cate Andrews, 2024.

A friendship without truth is like a sailing ship without a rudder…Beneath the Surface, 2021.

“A friendship without truth is like a sailing ship without a rudder” – Brandt, Beneath The Surface. German/Danish 2021.

Without going into too much detail about the drama series Beneath The Surface, 2021 (Danish/German languages), Brandt a father and character in the series who has a strong connection to the water: he is the coach of kayak polo, he lives with another family on a small Danish Island, and travels by water everyday to reach his workplace shops etc. The water is more than a surface or reflection of his life and intimate relations. It is deeply woven into the fabric of his flesh and relations. Disturbed by an accident, his commune-like living arrangements are questioned: was it ideal? He asks for the truth, about an incident involving his son, a sailing boat and the other family he has lived with for approximately 20 years.

The point here is his comment “A friendship without truth is like a sailing ship without a rudder” . A rudder steers and the loss of a rudder for a yacht will result in a violent change of course, sudden abrupt and spontaneous. The shock and the strength needed to sail with the new knowledge is for an experienced sailor. The friendship and two families shared a small island: two artists, 3 teenage children and one autistic young teen. They shared their lives and their raising of children. We, the audience assume this is a different love and a relationship dependent upon communicating: knowing others in your intimate lives: kitchen, bathroom, picking up children. A shared space with some boundaries. A friendship, for Brandt needs truth to steer and develop in his circumstance. The violent disruption revealed the inconsistencies in what they believed was right and a loving unit with the four adults as authority, family and couples.

The truth was difficult to feel and manage. For teenagers, the truth about themselves became unbearable, a burden and incommunicable. They held it within. They didn’t speak like they did about their lives: simply, easily and with trust. The knowledge, or new knowledge, meant like in Plato’s mutinous ship, the self-interested captain and crew didn’t have the knowledge to heal or reveal the truth about the situation. The truth, a collective knowledge – an antecedent to an incident on the sailing boat meant that undoing this collective revealed how it was kept together. A lack of awareness or plan and simply believing that their “love” would keep the two families afloat. A friendship can’t be like a mutinous ship: steered by an intoxicated (whether narcotics or self-indulgent ego) captain deaf to the needs of the crew. The truth? That unravels throughout the series…

© Cate Andrews, 2023.

Support?

“A story, like a bird of the mountain, can carry a name beyond the clouds, beyond time itself” – Tan Twan Eng (2023).

Mike Parr performance, painting with eyes shut 2023.

Abdul Abdullah, 2022, Legacy Assets 2m x 10m Oil on Linen.

Mike Parr and Abdul Abdullah are two artists I recently reflected about that challenge “support” in the arts and the general public. In the article What should we do with great art by paedophiles (clearly this is a legal conviction and without the conviction the label isn’t allowed), the writer suggests that when evaluating the artwork the law needs to ask Does the material in question have a tendency to “deprave and corrupt” those likely to view it? 

I ask, like Abdullah asks of colonial artworks, What about the victims? The triggers and trauma experiencing the celebration of their abuse and neglect. When are they viewed as valued and important? An unnamed fashion designer who calls themself a buddhist and a bohemian also with these labels, for me, suggests access that is privileged to appropriation of cultures not their own. A Kaftan. Nobody owns it but when people have been denied rights wearing something similar what does the label and expenses associated with “bohemian” suggest? What associations have the “bohemians” invented for themselves as usually, like Virginia Woolf and the Orientalist painters (I am brushing off an extensive list that the label and title umbrellas and often excuses for behaviour and values conflicts), are wealthy and privileged to travel and collect rugs, jewelry, cultural artefacts, holiday properties in “exotic lands” with sunshine and fresh fruit? Some are often considered degenerate like Andy Warhol and Oscar Wilde with their associations with young boys. The responsibility with values needs to be considered. Eng’s quote, poetic and full of hope, that we can experience beyond the clouds, also suggests that a name, a label carries a responsibility, a community awareness of the care needed for beyond the clouds and the story. How we listen and why we choose to listen can also be determined by authorities. Abdullah’s work suggests the vulnerability we face when considering support and sustainable care and practices for the landscape and people.

Mike Parr, not someone I consider a bohemian however unconventional his art is, recently made news for his large scale performance paintings addressing Nazism and the current Israeli aggression towards Palestine. Anna Schwartz, who represented Mike Parr for 36 years, decided after his most recent “blind” performance “Sadly I ended the association between Anna Schwartz Gallery and Mike Parr due to a serious breach of trust and difference of values.” (Prominent Australian artist Mike Parr dropped by Anna Schwartz Gallery over performance that referenced the Israel-Gaza War – ABC News). I return to the question, if art was to deprave and corrupt an audience, is the artist responsible and considered degenerate or paedophilic – or in this instance political – and needs dropping from “vision”? Parr has always corrupted vision. That is who he is and most avant garde performance artists from the 1960s – his American, European and Australian contemporaries. They corrupted vision to question vision and our connection with others. Abdullah also questions our vision of the landscape and the lost people neglected through frontier seeking, colonialism and politics. 

Support is about financial connections. The wealthy classes have created the bohemian, relaxed image: the vision created by fashion throughout time from Orientalism has been more about the privileged access to lazy days and relaxed clothes than about the places they originate. The criticism of the Orient was that they looked lazy. Shisha pipes, cushion rooms, excessive rugs and hot sun were criticised for being too feminine and irrational (Of course from this culture it is another culture that they know, that is their everyday life not an exotic escape). The Occident appropriated this image for the bohemian classes: the hash and opium addictions and laying lazily or dreamily (they have considered themselves the dreamers) about reading poetry is another image of wealth and privilege the western art world knows from Wilde, to Alice in Wonderland the lure to escape life with wealth and lazy days shrinking and puffing up when needed has hidden drug abuse and neglect. 

Abdullah is asking us to consider support and to question the language of entitlement and authority. To validate is to give voice to those lost and destroyed through landscape plundering. What do we owe, he asks, as artists and contemporary “being of one’s time” with the knowledge that naive wealthier classes didn’t have in their musings and construction of muses in the 18th and early 19th centuries? 

Artists ask questions. Abdullah is responding to many misinformed critics that suggest the “importance of a work” it’s provocation – using images of children that are often sexualised from Ancient times to present – is more important than the act that remains hidden in society to present day. Parr is suggesting that denying or excluding Palestinians from authoring and owning their identity – as well as some peace because the impact of unrest is intergenerational and creates more problems in society than an artist’s artwork, like PTSD and violence – that being dropped from representation is an irrational response to failure to accept criticism. 

As humans we don’t have conversations and problem-solving discussions well. Criticising in the right way takes effort and conscious change. Put downs and slamming the door is not the right way. Accepting difficult challenges is opening the doors to a depth that some -including the bohemians – resist and exclude. Difficult discussions use cognitive effort and intelligence beyond aggression is difficult. Control, or what Anna Schwartz indicates, coercive control of the public’s right to “see” Mike Parr’s work indicates anxiety and ego-centred authority. The refusal to include a community of voices. Abdullah suggests this support as well.

Howard Kennedy suggests that destroying an artwork destroys a witness and survivor’s access to healing.  Witnessing and experience or telling a story is difficult. Hearing criticism of choices and decisions made by groups, officials or families is difficult. Kennedy suggests that when “But when the works are gone, the victims will be permanently deprived of them”. What about depriving the victims’ of their right to public stories and access to authority? This is what I believe Parr and Abdullah are supporting, the right to have rights isn’t an easy healing process to simply display or reveal the perpetrator’s work and force healing this way. Supporting healing isn’t what Schwarz suggests: simply removing representation or deciding for others. Schwartz invalidates a voice. Whether oppressed people want an artist’s performance or not needs to be their choice and for some, the bitterness that it is not “our war” suggests that we have stood by and watched, as well as we don’t know the physical experience living the values of the conflict. For others, the support is welcome. The conversation opens doors to celebrate a flag denied. I was informed at university that it is my values that conflict with others and understanding this, being conscious of this, means developing an approach through discussions with an awareness of “values”. Our values conflict. Art has often produced conflict with social values. I do support artists that support their age group – I have disliked Germain Greer’s Beautiful boy essays approach publicly. She does need to recognise the young boy’s destroyed life and his need to feel validated. She needs to look at her own age group and accept rejection. When the young boy struggles, this is communicating neglect and abuse. His feelings, his rights he felt “nazi’s” or the totalitarian decision-makers determined his right to feel. He lost his self-determination to adults and their “look”.

© Cate Andrews, 2023.

Rodin. The film is a gift to see…

“Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself” – Coco Chanel

Rodin
2017
French Language film
directed by Jacques Doillon.

The sculpture is alive, with passion, pain, torment, pleasure, suffering and isolation. Sex. The film is a seduction and a gift to see the sculpture: as poetry, passion, love, and broken promises. The pain in the sexual relations – in freedom and egoism – is the pain in life and a life lived and we catch a glimpse of a life that was lived through art, as art and became art.

The film seduced through colour and gentle voices; through the lure to create art and the passion implicated in that creation. The seduction was the promise and the creation came from the lure of the promise. I could feel the smell of clay, the warmth of Rodin’s hands because I empathised with the creative process and his felt connection with his earth, his landscape, his hunger and his vision. This vision is not mine and I do not take it from him. I was at once brought close and at the same time, maintained an ethical distance; a distance that acknoweldged his alterity and his self expression as well as my own. Through the film, I could feel another’s touch and their world unfold through his caress of a tree trunk and admiration of a knotted branch.
The film took on a gentle nature through the sound of Rodin’s voice soothed and calmed and seduced the women in his presence. His love warmed the clay and drove him into his image of perfection – away from art history and the classical sculptures- he was driven by his own ideals of beauty, love, desire, passion. He was also driven by the refusals and rejections he had received; by the judges who refused to see his style or criticised him for fraud (casting real humans) or going beyond the canon that constructed the Ideal beauty in art. Rodin represented the female nude, and sex-as-passionate embrace, as “wild” (untamed by society and social values) and, beyond the serenity and rationalism of classical Greek sculptures. The patrons and public determined the art’s reception and they desired to see more timeless, rational and publicly acceptable expressions of sex, sexuality, and sexual desire.
In the film, Rodin’s love for Camille Claudel brought their art to life; brought their minds, hearts and bodies together and sustained a creative relationship. Society pushed them apart. Claudel deserved recognition separate from Rodin. Her need for his commitment separated them and also suggested that Rodin’s affection and admiration was also tainted by social structures: Why did he marry his housekeeper Rose (in the film)? The misogyny was subtle at times, and then seemed almost empathised with because male artists, such as Cezanne, appeared vulnerable and sensitive to rejection and constant criticism. There was also a tension between going beyond moral constructs of relationships – love and marriage – to experience love beyond marriage and child rearing. This failed. The housewife, Rose, appeared a normal and incompatible match with Rodin and her win also suggests her compromise, coldness, and inability to accept Rodin’s love for Claudel.

The seduction was felt, the dance of the scultpures and Rodin’s waltz with Claudel was intense. They were brought together at this moment through pain and desire. Their suffering – their physical separation – their bodies aching that mirrored the three words to describe the waltz mirrored what we see in Claudel’s sculpture. The sculpture’s meaning was presented to us in the film, the feeling the way we need to view it was enacted and given to us as a gift inviting us to see the sculpture differently and feel differently (about passion, intimacy, art, life).

Coco Chanel’s statement irrupted my imaginary when I was watching the 2017 film Rodin. I was irked by the black watch tartan dress worn by Camille Claudel’s friend and messenger to Rodin as well as worn by, later in the film, Camille Claudel. Memories of school uniforms, school girl gossip and overly critical teenage judgement. My own bodily reaction drained, for a moment, my interest in the film.
The beauty began to fade with my memories and personal attachments to the fabric as well as the indication of a turning point in the lovers lives.

The change from browns, creams tonal connections – in scenes where both Rodin and Claudel wore the same colours, reflecting and coexisting with and in their intimate space reflected was, for me aggressively disrupted. The rupture of their utopian, their ideal passionate world, was the social – values and the right marriage – as well as the jealousy of Rose, the Housekeeper and another of Rodin’s lovers or muses. Jealousy wasn’t witnessed between the models – all female – and the freedom in sexual expression appeared beyond jealousy or at least was given expression through the freedom to act out sexual competition together. Rose was controlling, cold and stern and demanding.

The black watch tartan brought me back into my body, dragged away from the pleasures of seeing and involvement in a lovers intimate space, and all I could see was Victorian England and Foucault’s questioning and examination of pleasure and pleasurable expression (or Victorian English traces in oppressive sexual expression and sexuality) that suggests knowledge of sex must be medical and confined to religious and medical discourses (with legal discourse through marital exchange and capital gain). Yet no knowledge of pleasure, the fabric and it’s style, length, colour and my memory (I would read this, today, as holistic and without pornography) represents a shift without jouissance, without multiple pleasures in art, intimacy, conversation, life.

The black watch tartan, a symbol of Scottish war and throughout the ages English fashion disrupted the seduction and the promise to continue, together, creating passionately with a marriage/commitment. In the film, the black watch tartan appears at the same time there is mention of Claudel’s visit to England. I have found a black and white photograph of Camille Claudel and companion both in frilled skirts and the faded suggestion that it was in a tartan pattern. Beauty faded with the distance put between them by society and the broken promise. The physical passion wasn’t sustained. Following Chanel, Claudel didn’t seem her past self. Change.

The film made explicit the interconnection between sexual desire, lust, passion and intellectual connection with artistic creation. The birth of sculpture came from the passion of lovers. I saw in the chapters of the film, the lines of unworked clay, the markings in a block of clay mirror a heart beat, a sketch pad, random and chanced imperfections, subtle and the pulse of life. Rodin elevated clay. His statement, poetic and carnal. His passion to capture something unseen before, as well as the sitter; and his passion to create was the man.

The man broke promises. The desire superseded the need for promises but couldn’t be sustained. Beyond these broken promises was the sculpture of Honore Balzac. A French writer, a man whose life I associate – like Victor Hugo – with France and French literature. A man who wrote Paris and French life, now standing alone, a statue in an outdoor museum in Japan; located in a foreign language to his own and a landscape insignificant to his writing; that hasn’t breathed his skin nor he the land that he has been placed in. Alone and neglected in a vernacular that is not his own. Both Rodin and Balzac are peripheral figures when thinking through French history, yet they are men that have achieved more central attention than Camille Claudel and other women artists and writers who struggled at the time with social values that refused to see their art as important and valued.
The film achieved in its representation of sexual passion and the giving to us, the audience, a way into seeing the sculptures of Rodin and Camille Claudel. The film is a gift to change our perception, on an intimate level, altering our own connection with the sculptures. And, the way the artists have created them: a corporeality of their own; a life affirming force.

©Cate Andrews, 2021. 

The strange enchantment of her ways…Carolee Schneemann’s film Fuses, 1964 (a contemporary conversation)

The strange enchantment of her ways…(Baudelaire)

A line from a poem by Baudelaire to begin this text. I revisited an old project from over a decade ago and I have found the most difficult thing to do is to look at the images. Fuses (1964) an erotic film by Carolee Schneeman is located in art history under the label “feminist body art” or other labels with feminism. The images of the film confront us not simply because there are flashes of female and male genitals but also because our vision is assaulted by flickers and flashes of painted stars and bright lights. I find it difficult to watch because the flickering images mark me, and remain as traces in memory; the flickers displace and disrupt my need for self-domination or my choice to control my field of vision in an art historical context. I did not want to let go, or abandon myself as others do in front of pornography created and constructed for capital exchange. Without my listening skills activated, the images were simply: “evershifting play of surfaces” which I constantly played a role in my own “re-evaluation of all my values” to refuse reification inside my body (Schroeder, 2001, p188). I want to own and play a role in my own erotics and my own values refuse to identify with constructed images given to me through popular culture, mainstream film, and even at times art.

 This desire to control or my own struggle is, I believe these days because I am older, my attempt to reduce negative physiological responses. My eyes did not enjoy or take pleasure in the flickers. The images imaged discomfort or a dis-ease that my neurobiology attempted to protect or reduce the potential visually aggressive harm. I am not suggesting that sex, eroticism or nudity is harmful to my eye when it is my own consent. I am, however suggesting that visual assaults even in art can occasionally prove too aggressive not in their message or want for social change, but simply their image as experienced by my visual processor: my sensitive neurobiology! For Levinas, transcendence does not occur solely through vision and it is sound that provides support or access to our transcendence. Listening and conversation, dialogue and exchanges with voice and more importantly through the right education.

Schroeder (2001) suggests that an ethical relationship is created, constructed and challenging established norms, through a listening eye that is mediated through education. Caught in a struggle between using sight and the domination of sight in our everyday and our own needs for listening, feeling heard and enriching our lives with others, we often deny our musical and emotional connections with the earth. Fuses (1964) is a film created within a framework by an artist who desired to transform other women’s lives erotically. Schneeman advocated that her film and approach to art making was a gift that, like the Trobriand Islanders Kula ring, contained a form of magic.

“O mystic fusion that, enwreathing

My senses, fuses each in each,

To hear the music of her breathing

And breathe the perfume of her speech.” (Baudelaire, All in One, trans Roy Campbell, 1952).

The magic or mystical giving was also a receiving in the Kula exchange. A bond was formed. Schneeman’s gift was a giving I believe in the hope to transform the experience of women (around the 1960s, and I think still relevant today) female-to-female violence or indirect aggression that is often sexual and involves malicious, vindictive attacks subconsciously grounded in genital envy and sexual competition for a mate. Without looking at the film today, the message still resonates: education in the right way might provide people with an erotic ethics that attempts to reduce or remove harm caused from jealous rejection, lack of knowledge about the right person for intimate relations, consent, and other relationship issues that spill out into society.

The music of her breathing. We hear the sound of the ocean waves breaking and rolling continuously throughout the film. Like a meditation or relaxation CD we are sensuously touched by the sounds of nature. It is common knowledge that nature and natural sounds reduces stress, anger and anxiety and can increase pleasant feelings and improve overall well-being. Music can also reduce stress hormones and just like sex, the right conversation and listening to the people and sounds we enjoy can trigger positive physiological responses. We feel aroused. Our arousal, fight, flight or rest responses are our inter- and intra-personal relations with others. Our transcendence can, in the light of listening to the dialogues and conversations Schneeman created about her art projects as well as listening to nature and hearing how we respond internally to the sounds and the environment, transform our relations with others in the world. We can ethically listen to nature and choose to act ethically in relation to our lifestyle as well as listen to others and take in their needs to feel heard as well as our own to enrich our lives being-with others.

The film was difficult to see for many people at the time. There were frustrated and aggressive responses and a refusal to see. The film was created by two lovers in a long-term relationship. As a gift, a mystical or magical enchantment, the soul of the earth: the sound of the waves, in connection with the lovers presents an educational opportunity. The lovers are not wealthy, and their eroticism is not flowered with expensive editing and special effects. The environment has a voice and is integral to the erotic performance. The care taken being-with each other extends to the landscape and the environment around. The sound is free. The ocean freely crashes and rolls in and is moved by the wind. The loving act is a consensual free act and the magic that is meant to be a gift to the audience is, the trusting caring exploration together can potentially produce an orgasm together. If we are to include the interest at the time of Wilhelm Reich here, then we begin to see that through education or an unlearning of standard norms and values, the environment is cared for (more than politics attempts, especially in the current NSW Premier’s lack of policy concerning the environment and its care)the orgasm is political because being-with, together, it has the potential to refuse politics, corruption and the capital exchange that creates pornography as an industry.

Schneeman’s art attempts to fuse the body and the soul; attempts to question binary or dualist misconceptions about mind/body split and affirms heterosexuality as a positive, life transforming experience that creates an ethos that is coexisting and equal, that is intertwined and acknowledges the existence of each sex/gender. My senses, fuses each in each (Baudelaire), the soul is part of the earth’s mystique and intertwined with our metamorphosis, our transformation together is my departure from my own original dialogue or conversation with Schneeman’s work. My life was transformed and through time I have transformed beyond the simple image and confrontation that this is an erotic film created by a woman with the label “feminist”. Both Nietzsche and Levinas suggest we need listening eyes for the revaluation of all values and I value this film for the teaching/learning I am through it: I am both the teacher, the giver of information and questions as well as the learner or receiver of a gift that I do not perceive as wholly mine to keep. Like the Kula ring, the magic is to keep the gift in circulation and to value the gift, to starve off war or to maintain a friendship bond. Like validating a person who desires to feel heard and in that hearing they feel care and connection, the value of the gift is the music: the words that have become action and thought as well as the waves that have spoken the need for protection and respect of and being-with Others: the earth, fire, air, water, (elements, flora and fauna) and the humans who deserve our attention.

Campbell, R. (1952). Poems of Baudelaire. New York: Pantheon Books.

Reich, W. (1961). Wilhelm Reich Selected Writings: AN Introduction to Orgonomy. USA: Macmillan.

Schneeman, C. (1964). Fuses. (film) Schroeder, B. (2001). The Listening Eye: Nietzsche and Levinas. Research in Phenomenology. 31. 188-202. http://www.jastor.org/stable/24659214

©Cate Andrews, 2021.