“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.
Lying is exhausting: Adults on trial in the German series The Allegation, 2021.
The script in Series 1 Episode 7 for the psychologist in the courtroom caught my attention the most. However, visually what I was reminded of in this scene was a children’s picture book by Jeannie Baker Window (1991, Random House) and the companion book Belonging (2004, Walker Books). I was reminded of collage and perception: windows and frameworks (literal and metaphor) as well as belonging: for children finding a home in a culture and language – especially after neglect and abuse – is difficult and for some exhausting. Collage connects and disconnects, cutting and fragments, joining and re-writing a story from other stories. The courtroom in Germany – the long bench looked to me like corrugated iron in Baker’s illustrations and the rag-doll hair of the judge and legal profession looked out of place or imposed upon a scene of order: vertical lines, iron work circles. The imposition: attempting to conclude from evidence corrupted by unconscious leading and misleading adult evidence and interpretation within a legal framework as well as the human need for belonging: safely and recognition of a story and the right to survive one imposed (child sex abuse and neglect).
Lying. I put this script to the test and, with some humour and more often revealing my distaste towards the Hollywood machine, found that if you researched stress and exhaustion as well as drug neglect you will find the lies, of, for example, one perspective Hollywood (the most imposed entertainment structure in my own English speaking world/society and culture. However, my first thought leads me to young learners in the classroom: do not provide lessons that cognitively overload nor undervalue the individual. Cognitive stress and distress is exhausting as well as fails to set up the learner for success, for their right to feel “good” about themselves. To reduce the stress would mean to increase and improve well-being – and hopefully lessen the ageing process associated with stress. We never associate “stress” with the new world wealth or new leisure class elevated often from Trailer parks and prostitution with Hollywood stars/actors: easy lifestyles and barely any lines to learn in action/blockbuster films with green screens and digital technology working hard to churn out products for everyday consumption. For those who want to think less and put their feet up more (mindlessly) The ageing process of Hollywood or instant fame and pop stardom attempts to be hidden: the stress? perhaps alcohol? perhaps drug addiction and low self esteem? So many possibilities that lead beyond a factory worker’s stressful daily routine and struggle to maintain family welfare, a healthy lifestyle and (unfortunately to go to the cinema to support these false stars or liars – just images and a story) attempt to relax. The gap between rich and poor widens, however the social, emotional and psychological problems remain still human: drug neglect, abuse, alcoholism and other stressful activities doesn’t discriminate and nor do the more stressful physical ailments (beyond my discussion here).
Of course, I also thought of the manipulation of images constructed for mainstream culture. Fragments and stories given without question to consumers. What can unfold if the story is already cut-out, pasted and produced for certainty and meaning? Like those monster folds where a group participates in creating an unknown figure through drawing a part then passing it folded, unseen, to another group member to continue. The belief is that it is random or spontaneous. However, the folded or unseen is purposeful. The group – often children – desire to make the most out of the fold and to construct a whacky, enjoyable monster to produce laughter and spontaneity. The adults in The Allegations take control of the story, the folds, the direction and the meaning.
Just as Hollywood reduces the spontaneity in experience (to safety and comfort in the same-ness of others and their “attention-gathering”) and attempts to resolve any questioning and uncertainty. Kurt Vonnegut Jr described this as a dystopian world, one where equality is achieved through the loss of creativity, individuality and freedom of expression. A society with total conformity abuses attractive people and, for example, above average achievers, because equality means everyone is the same and gets the same. Conformism becomes authoritarianism and through totalitarian rule, individual differences and voices are absolutely denied and defied for the status quo (listen to The Nightmare of Total Equality – A Warning to the World. 14/01/2022. The Eternalist. Podcast on Spotify). Afra steps out of this feminine equality and normative status to question as a monster, a violent aggressive woman, the law, corruption and the drama of law played out as theatre for the public. The nightmare of equality – of a chance within the law – becomes the nightmare of loss of freedom for many women (and others) attempting to create their open individual and/or group identity as well as the children in the TV series The Allegation. Doubt in Vonnegut Jr.’s novel is potentially reduced to equality as well as denied as a questioning approach to certainty, the law and conformity to…whom? And to what?
Seamless and fused: the Hollwood/fashion images produce an experience we are distant from and cannot quite achieve: the mirrors that reflect the mirrors as we stand outside and the script unfolds purposefully. In the Allegation, the character Afra puts doubt into my spectatorship certainty: her presence produces absences (literally, she is a hired hitwoman) as well as doubt in the legal process even when a new trial must begin that does commence with the certainty that the children were abused. Afra, a monster unfolding (an aggressive, woman without noticeable social values nor an ethics we can immediately support as questioning social constructs of ethnicity -to German- as well as femininity and the law) as well as a strong woman challenging femininity as well as an outsider in German society – a Turkish woman working for the Chinese underworld.
The photoshopped images evidence lies, they fabricate, distort and construct a truth un;likely to be questioned for change or transformation of what we accept as an important image or reflection of our society: the stress of the body from partying reveal the ageing process. The inconsistent stories that are constructed by Hollywood to sell a cinematic experience is clear. The lack of belonging that I feel: lack of connection through neglect of my own physicality and desire to explore my own ageing process beyond constructed Hollywood norms and impositions mirror the courtroom doubt and uncertainty unfolding in The Allegations. The adults are put on trial. The children need, quite importantly, the lawyer stated, respect and their vulnerability acknowledged. The legal proceedings as well as manufacturing the evidence, he argues, sheds light on the history in denying children a voice and autonomy within the legal system as well as their right to express a story that is valued for their truth as well as integrity. Children were therefore deemed as secondary, without rights or a voice, and some adults perceived as worthless or needing integrity. The lawyer, who didn’t seem to present us with an ethics of care, did turn around and argue that the lives of the children were jeopardised by adults and the doubt produced unjust because of the adults and not their statements. This argument was beyond his position as the defence lawyer for the accused – one of the adults.
Under oath as an expert witness Professor Brandenberg (The Alegation, 2021, expert witness) states, summarising her assessment of children’s statements that they alledge they experienced sexual abuse,
…”lying is much harder than telling the truth. The mental effort required by the person telling the lie is much greater. (Why?) A true report needs only be made from memory. Some things are remembered, others not. One simply says what happened. A lie, on the other hand is a construction…Inventing testimony about a complex event and maintaining it over a long period is exhausting…”
Like Hollywood construction of identity for the purpose and meaning of capital exchange and to value only the film as a construct and distance from life, children and their evidence can be consciously and unconsciously manipulated by a supposed “expert”. The children might be saying what the questioner wants to hear, just as the consumer of Hollywood wants to consume the package deal or the lies (fairytale) of photoshop, glamour, and deception (cosmetic enhancements or tortures, etc of eternal youth – evidenced in the younger as well as Madonna generation of Popular culture or Campbell’s Soup can , or what I call the Andy Warhol approach to beauty and 15 minutes of fame – see the lies extended beyond 15 minutes through botox within the production of Kardashian fame and what is attempted or mirrored on the streets on faces of women who desire to look better in a photograph than in the flesh. They want the lie and this, for some, reveals an aggression that is indirect and unseen or difficult to witness as well as physical (female-to-female violence, as well as male-to-female and vice versa physical aggression does exist). Just as children are vulnerable to manipulation so are those who consume and want to believe the constructs or lies.
A child will often return to an abusive parent because that is their parent, their connection and biological bond. The approach for some social workers is to attempt to change or break the neglect cycle through empowering the parent beyond their own history. Through a window, the tv series offers a disturbing question: the children’s voices are difficult to hear and the potential for adults to alter the evidence unjust and unfair. It’s alienating and isolating as well as, what the expert also suggests, can create fear: they might be afraid of giving the evidence. Belonging is a book that shifts perspectives from alienation to belonging in a home. The German series suggests this process is still in its early stages for a lot of child sex abuse survivors (young and old) in the courtroom as well as in society.
Cate's Art and Film conversations 
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