Untitled (No, No, Just Looking, Thanks ... ): Part 01

Fig. 1. Wolfgang Laib - Without Place-Without Time-Without Body, 2007

When Seeing Is Listening: The Concert Champêtre

Fig. 1. Titian - Le Concert champêtre, c. 1510

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of
me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my
mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to
the top of my compass: and there is much music,
excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot
you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me.

Hamlet (Hamlet, Act II, Scene iii – William Shakespeare)

'Even if our only evidence were their surviving output, it would still be abundantly clear that artists of the sixteenth century were routinely acquainted with, and profoundly sensitive to, the fact that looking is something we do with all of our senses, not merely that of sight. Titian, the artist who is believed to have painted what is now officially referred to as Le Concert champêtre, c. 1510, not only knew this to be true, but also made it integral to the effect and meaning of his image that it should be heard as well as seen, that its visibility should be inextricably entwined with its audibility. Patricia Egan, Philipp Fehl, and Patricia Emison, in their (variously convincing) interpretations of this enigmatic work, all make reference to how its musical content serves to structure our reading of it. None, however, correctly identifies the implied sonic lacuna around which its iconography is constellated.'

Lucio Crispino (from When Seeing Is Listening: The Broken Music of Titian's Le Concert champêtre)

Pinning The Tale On Jenny Watson: The Art Of " ... "

Fig. 1. Jenny Watson - A Painted Page 1: Twiggy by Richard Avedon, 1979

Fig. 2. Jenny Watson - 'I woke up. I was in a hurry ...', 1993/94

Clearly, in undertaking an internal and architectonic analysis of a work … and in delimiting psychological and biographical references, suspicions arise concerning the absolute nature and creative role of the subject. But the subject should not be entirely abandoned. It should be reconsidered, not to restore the theme of an originating subject, but to seize its functions, its intervention in discourse, and its systems of dependencies. We should suspend the typical questions: how does a free subject penetrate the density of things and endow them with meaning; how does it accomplish its design by animating the rules of discourse from within? Rather, we should ask: under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse; what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse? In short, the subject … must be stripped of its creative role and analysed as a complex and variable function of discourse.

Michel Foucault

Jenny Watson might explain her art in Samuel Butler’s words - that art is interesting only insofar as it reveals the artist. The figures in her paintings, to be sure, are often self-portraits, surrogate or otherwise. The horse is her horse. The shoes are hers. Jenny Watson’s paintings can also be said to reveal an artist in the other, more profound, sense: her art shows the continuous rites of ‘becoming’ that an artist performs for her audience. For Jenny Watson, in particular, the art of painting is constitution of the artistic ego.

Paul Taylor

I really want art to be taken from life. I’m uncomfortable with ‘art for art’s sake’. I find a lot of abstraction completely empty for that reason. If you’re making ‘art for art’s sake’, it’s very hard to make something that is about art and also relative to the real world.

Jenny Watson

'Jenny Watson is, and always has been, an astute pictorial strategist. There are two reasons for this: one to do with sensibility, the other to do with circumstance. Firstly, Watson is an avowedly self-conscious practitioner of her art, who deplores the notion of painting as a spontaneous outpouring of an artist’s inner life. Secondly, the formative years of her practice coincided with the rise of Postmodernism, which gave renewed impetus to what is still generally referred to as “the crisis of authorship”. In an eponymous essay, Roland Barthes, the literary and cultural theorist whose eloquent polemical forays into the topic were crucial in fashioning the new discursive and material identities of those who produce texts, even went so far as to proclaim ‘the death of the author’. However, as Watson’s work amply illustrates, declarations of the author’s demise were greatly exaggerated - though not as greatly as some of her Neoexpressionist peers would have us believe. While her early images confidently exemplify the accent on detachment favoured by several of the more intransigent members of Melbourne’s appropriationist fraternity, her transitional and, later, her “signature” pieces, retain (and tacitly valorise) certain freshly discredited (and ostensibly defunct) humanist tropes: namely, subjectivity, expression, and originality. In fact, it is her tactical, often whimsical, fusion of intimacy and irony that Watson most wants us to notice, and to fathom.'

Lucio Crispino (from Pinning The Tale On Jenny Watson: The Art of " ... ")

Illusions Cut To The Measure Of Desire: A Love Story

Fig. 1. Anca Daucikova - Kissing Hour (video), c. 2000

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

Sigmund Freud

'The longing to be, the act of falling, and the bliss of actually being in love are almost always thought of as quintessentially romantic states; which most of us experience more than once, though rarely as we had anticipated - or, alas, in ways we later care to remember. And what are love stories, if not anthems to the desires that engender, and the memories that embalm, the loves we win and lose in the course of our amatory lives? Though short, and not much more demanding than a Billboard ballad, Jaime Marques’ El paraíso perdido, 1999, is just such an anthem.'

Lucio Crispino (from Illusions Cut to the Measure of Desire: Varieties of Love in Jaime Marques’ Paradise Lost, 1999)

The Ballad Of Piet The Neat And Jack The Dripper

Fig. 1. Piet Mondrian - New York City I (1941-42)

'The paradoxes of abstract art run deep. At its best (and most interesting) it is the manifest sum of its formal and conceptual tensions - a sometimes sober, sometimes sizzling alliance of quotidian means and immaterial aspirations, in which order and disorder, relativity and universality, immanence and transcendence are repeatedly invoked, frequently juxtaposed, and occasionally reconciled by a profusion of defiantly unique pictorial dialects. For some, these essentially private idioms are unconscionably arcane, proof that abstract art is a pointless, wilfully hermetic practice, hell-bent on maintaining the aesthetic and discursive obscurantism that, from very its inception, has kept it severed from its natal contexts and deprived it of any real capacity to modify the way we think and feel about the social environments in which we live. For others, abstract art’s hermeticism is a sign of its autonomy, not its insularity - a mark of its aptness as a vantage point from which to image the experience of modernity, not an indicator of its solipsism or indifference. According to this view, the mature work of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock had - and still has - the ability to both challenge and change its audience. Question is: can abstractionists speak to all of us, or are they nothing more than a ragtag confederacy of self-obsessed monads?'

Lucio Crispino (from An Infinity of Discrete Orders and Indiscreet Disorders: The 'Hermeticism' of Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock's Late Abstractions)

The Enigma And The Ecstasy: Botticelli's Primavera

Fig. 1. Sandro Botticelli - Primavera, c. 1482


'We should also note that, Flora, after becoming Zephyr’s bride, never ceased waxing lyrical about his prowess as a lover, or his superlativeness as a husband; that the suppression of Venus’ lustful aspect also entails the suppression of her sexual vitality; that it is an infantile male, Eros, who “inflames” Thalia’s/Semiramide’s heart with a preference for emotional enchantment over erotic desire; that female perfection is represented as something achieved by “cultivation”, while male perfection remains fully conversant with the “wild” forces of nature; and that, ultimately, the address of the painting is to a woman who is being asked to see herself not as someone who acts, but, rather, as someone who is acted upon (just as Semiramide was in being married off to Lorenzo). Flaunting its links to Ovid’s Fasti, Botticelli’s Primavera is one continuous metamorphosis, which kicks off with a violent deflowering and powers down with the passive blossoming of a woman into a wife. In the process, the bride-to-be is reassured of her safety, and of her importance to the Medici - especially to Lorenzo the Magnificent, who rewards in her in advance by encouraging her to think of herself (via Botticelli’s demure Venus) as supreme mistress of his family’s vernal Garden of Love. Identity has been exchanged for image, thanks to the ennobling influence of a cast of archaic luminaries and the “naturalising” propensity of a superabundant, ostensibly eternal, Nature.'

Lucio Crispino (from The Enigma and The Ecstasy: On Reading Botticelli's Primavera, c. 1482

The Body Regained: Donatello And The Male Nude

Fig. 1. Donatello - Ascension Pulpit (Church of San Lorenzo, Florence), 1460-65

'It is in what is believed to be one of his final creations, the Ascension Pulpit (San Lorenzo, Florence, 1460-65), that Donatello bequeaths us a remarkable clue to the riddle of his diverse - and, in many respects, ambiguous - representations of the male body. Over a series of three abutting panels, a man journeying from Purgatory to Paradise is shown struggling to free himself from the haggard, yet plainly mulish, straitjacket of his expired flesh. In the first, he wades through a seething throng of grasping, zombie-like corpses. In the second, he clambers sluggishly over the knee-high lip of his own sepulchre. In the third, he is finally (albeit awkwardly) tugged to his celestial destination by a risible flotilla of pint-sized cherubs. This is no ordinary man, of course, but Christ incarnate. Equally, this is no ordinary depiction of his flickering mortality. In countless canonical versions, by both earlier and later artists, he is majestically ethereal (i.e. disembodied) well in advance of his ascension. Here, however, he evinces Donatello’s career-long obsession with resurrecting the body - figured primarily as the male body - in art. Rising from its historical grave, to which it had been consigned by the carnally censorious Middle Ages, the body returns to sculpture with amplified naturalism and sensuality: and, by exceeding both sacred and classical propriety, spills out into the world of lived experience.

This impression of corporeal “excess”, artfully “spilling out” beyond the bounds of either an actual or putative frame, is one that appears repeatedly, though not always prominently, in Donatello’s representations of the male body. In the Ascension, for example, it is deftly and discreetly sutured into the narrative, taking the form of Christ’s haloed head rising to meet, then breaching, the decorative banding that separates the reliefs proper from the entablature. In his bronze David (early 1440s), on the other hand, it permeates the entire work - which, being the first freestanding statue of its type since antiquity, can be read as a flamboyant transgression of the moral and aesthetic proscriptions of medieval culture. It is in his Judith and Holofernes (late 1450s), though, that Donatello mines this trope for its full compositional, expressive and polemical potential. Holofernes’ legs, which dangle limply from the cramped pediment on which he is being so spectacularly slaughtered are, above all, exquisitely naturalistic (and hence highly seductive) eye-level intensifiers of his handsomely proportioned (but also brutishly villainous) masculinity. Whether or not Donatello was conscious of using this ingenious trope as a metaphor for his epoch-making liberation of the flesh from its centuries-old sarcophagus is debatable; but the fact that it exists, and that it predominantly - at times insistently - figures the body’s “resurrection” as male, is not.'

Lucio Crispino (from The Body Regained: Donatello's Representations of the Male Body)