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)

Over Her Wed Body: On Gifting And Countergifting

Fig. 1. The Botticelli Workshop - The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti (first episode), c. 1483

'Patrician marriages in northern Renaissance Italy were convoluted, expensive, protracted, and intensely bureaucratic affairs. They entailed an obligatory series of public meetings and ritual celebrations, at which deals were struck, vows were made, and, most importantly, gifts were exchanged in order to advance not only the union of the bride- and groom-to-be, but also the desired alliance of their respective clans. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s description of the Renaissance road to matrimony as both a ‘nuptial scenario’ and a ‘network of exchanges based on gift and countergift’ aptly characterises it as a strategic fusion of social and commercial rites: i.e. as a zesty concoction of theatre and business. ‘It was’, she writes, a ‘symbolic process by which new relationships were established between lineages.’ Symbolism of a more explicit - and problematic - kind is discernible in images that adorn the larger of these endowments, cassoni and spalliere. For instance, “exemplary” narratives valorising the ‘quiet suffering’ of women do more than simply exhort their female viewers to wifely virtue. They also implicitly validate the husband’s lawfully inscribed right to ‘assert [his] power over the whole of the conjugal estate’, including the gifts “given” to his bride as part of their betrothal negotiations and marriage ceremonies - and, more disturbingly, over the silent (read: silenced) body of the bride herself.'

Lucio Crispino (from Over Her Wed Body: The Importance of Gift Giving in Italian Renaissance Marriage Rituals)

A Lust Less Ordinary: Revisiting Bart Tare's Problem

Fig. 1. Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) and Bart Tare (John Dall) in Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy, 1950


'Bart Tare (John Dall), the protagonist of Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950), has a problem. He is afflicted - or so we are told - with a ‘dangerous mania for guns’. His once anodyne passion for firearms has mutated into a pathological lust. He must therefore be taught how to curb his aberrant desire, as well as his narcissistic insistence on gratification, in accordance with the rule of law. Consecutive stints in reform school and the army almost do the trick. After meeting Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), however, his tenuous rehabilitation comes fatally unstuck. Bart’s failure - the source not only of incessant angst, but also of escalating thrills - furnishes him, and the film, with their narrative and emotional trajectories. These, in turn, reveal Bart’s problem to be a toxic medley of ingrained psychosocial, affective, and existential ailments. More, though, needs to be said about the analogical relation between Bart’s acute moral incoherence (his real “disorder”) and the performative heterogeneity of Gun Crazy’s transgressively idiosyncratic form.'

Lucio Crispino (from A Lust Less Ordinary: Revisiting Bart Tare's Problem in Gun Crazy, 1950)

Before It Speaks, Every Body Has It Own Language

Fig. 1. Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) - Killer's Kiss (d. Stanley Kubrick, 1955)


' ... the body is like a sentence that can be broke down into separate parts so that its true contents can be put together in an endless series of anagrams ... '

Jacques Lacan