Helmut Newton, dead at 83

Anyway, Newton found a pretty cool way to die and I'm sure he's partying in hell right now with Robert Palmer and lots of suicidal models.

'I’ve always liked the idea of cowboys — the way they look, they way they walk, especially in the movies. Why? A cowboy stands a certain way. He’s got a gun here, a gun there, his hands are always ready to draw. So I make the girls into cowgirls — with their hands ready to reach for the guns. But I don’t tell them, I just show them. I stand for them. I show them exactly what they should be doing.'

John Currin is the same animal for art. Painting two types of women, big breated women and strong (small chested) women. Genius!

In regards to the comment of how he shows his models what he wants, he's not capturing personalities, he's creating an image. Models are supposed to be a blank canvas, they're just tools, big bendy dolls. They are there to assist in the production of his vision. The same can be said of actresses, they are doing what they're told, saying what they're supposed to say. The creation of these kinds of art lends itself to a natural exploitation of its tools, but just because they are created by men using women does not necessarily mean the women are subservient to the men.

Did you eventually see the film, then?

Just my opinion. I don't claim to be an expert.

No problem whatsoever, but everyone has a different fantasy and this big metallic cowboy woman in suspenders is not mine.

You mean, as opposed to Philip Guston? As opposed to William Eggleston? Or is the contrast with the Pirelli calendar?

I'm not criticising Newton or Currin's desires. Or anyone who looks at their work and likes what they see. That's absolutely cool. Absolutely cool.

What bugs me about Currin and Newton's works is how it dovetails so perfectly with stereotypes of pre-liberated feminity. It's not that I can't see the power of these stereotypes for desire and eroticism or that I would prefer to police desire and eroticism so that it is only kind and sweet and good and fair. It's just that when I look at pictures - especially art, which is supposed to be self-reflective on this score - I want to see an attempt to push the conventions into a more interesting territory.

I'm not criticising their - or anybody else's - desire or pleasure; I just want more interesting art. Or maybe what I'm saying is that I've got no interest in telling anyone else what to like or what not to like, but I get pleasure out of seeing artists deal with these issues (its a kind of skill in itself) as well as taking pleasure from the pictures or whatever. Currin and Newton, in a way, don't offer me that pleasure.

I think it's actually a caricature of post-liberated (and somewhat post-human) femininity, a kind of Terminator idea of ultra-tough women. Has anyone ever met someone like that, outside of an SM club?

1. big breated objects of impotent lust, and
2. flat chested strong women (threatening mother-figures)

If this is post-feminist, then its 'post-ness' is uncannily antedeluvian. Don't these 'types' strike you as all-too-familiar?

Newton's women are images of strength on the condition that their strength is sexualised (ie limited to the sphere of sexual play). This is also an antedeluvian trope. The strongest women in pre-feminist literature are sexual predators.

I know these two artists work in very different ways and there are some important differences between them, but comparisons are not that difficult to sustain.

FITE!

Currin, I would say, loves something closer to women as they really are on the Benny Hill Show

http://www.supervert.com/essays/art/images/currin/currin_2.jpg

no, it would be like "learning about something before expressing one's opinion thereof"

Come anticipate my next album, Thomas. Do that? Sorry, you have to buy it now!

My point exactly, Thomas!

No it wasn't!

Compare Manet's "Une Bar aux Folies-Bergère": woman as thinking for herself, resistant to the sexualising gaze, etc etc. Wouldn't do much for the marketing industry, though, admitted.

Newton: 1940s calendar girl reborn tougher, more metallic, 'hard as a man', even naked. As though the pin-up girl on the WWII aircraft had actually fused with the fuselage and come back as a robot.
Currin: By the 1990s we're kind of bored with Angie Dickinson as 'Police Woman', and with this stereotype of the woman 'tough as any man'. So we get the return of the repressed. Women are women after all! The shock of the womb. Transgression! The strangeness! The otherness! There is something here which is different from the world of men! Maybe something valuable!

No problem whatsoever, but everyone has a different fantasy and this big metallic cowboy woman in suspenders is not mine.

*

Momus, I never took you as someone who will only acknowledge and applaud their own fantasia. It seems quite egotistic, dull and conceited to me. And though Kill Bill isn’t exactly a documentary, and so is quite free to play with the conservative notion of woman, I feel it can be easily presumed that there’s a myriad of females out there who could effortlessly kick your emaciated ass. You just happen to encircle yourself with delicate, childlike, vulnerable Nipponese.

PS – what about… you know? Last week, my rectum! Fantasias are cool.

http://www.faheykleingallery.com/images/photographs/bourdin_g/bourdin_01_bg.jpg

But isn't this paleo-feminist idea of the strong woman who is 'just as hard as a man' actually tremendously conservative? Doesn't it go a long way towards erasing the difference of women altogether? You know, when they switched from abled to disabled police series in the 70s (Ironside) and from male to female (Police Woman), that was a way of saying 'They may be female / disabled, but they are still men! Well, that's great if all your emotional investment is in the penis, and you want all difference to be erased. Otherwise, it's a step backwards, not forwards.

You forgot 'submissive'! Aren't you post-feminist, post-stereotype types always meant to add that?

The conservative suggestion is that of “man” and “woman” at all, in terms of generalization. There are weak men and strong women, dumb women and smart men, emotional men and emotionless women. Kill Bill represents a number of women as strong (to a fantastic extreme), yes, but it still has the odd lady screaming in the corner… and the odd man being castrated.

You forgot 'submissive'! Aren't you post-feminist, post-stereotype types always meant to add that?

And what is it you post-modernist types call a spade these days?

or your persecutors turn out to be (are turned into) exactly what you desire.

I hate to disappoint you, but men and women exist, and differ. They exist -- and differ -- on a basic biological level, and on the level of cultural identities. Let's not try to re-invent the wheel, otherwise we'll be here all millenium.

Your position is contradictory. You are saying that there are no gender essences, but that you applaud those who challenge the essences there... are.

The problem is how do we understand those differences, and I'm afraid, Momus, that you often don't seem to understand those differences at all well. I mean, when you say that Currin paints women as women again (after representations of women as men) you're going way beyond recognising men and women as different, you're fixing those differences on very stereotypical terms.

Woman as womb is woman as woman, for instance. Jesus! As if the idea of woman as woman isn't bad enough.

Nonsense, only commies sleep well at night and you know it.

No, this is not what a reactionary is. Reactionary has three meanings

i. opposed to reforms
ii. wishing to go back to a previous condition
iii. right-wing

If you'd allowed me my slightly creative definition of 'reactionary' I might have been more inclined to allow this very creative definition of misogyny as 'philogyny with strict conditions'. It makes no sense to say love and hate are marginal qualifications of each other, unless you want one term to dominate the other; to say, for instance, that women can only ever be hated, even when they are loved. But why would you want that built into words you have to use about your own feelings too?

The 'we' I'm articulating here is a male, anglo-saxon 'we'. This is not the case in France or Japan, cultures much more open to the idea of 'good differences'. To the idea that there may be differences we may want to value for their differences, and not for their similarities. For me it's very clear that French women and Japanese women are much more comfortable with the kind of femininity their culture acknowledges in them than British or American women are. The French and Japanese also have an attitude towards foreign cultures which is more UNESCO than NATO; which seeks to preserve 'good differences' rather than bomb them towards some 'inevitable' convergence.

Valuing 'good differences' is not incompatible with 'feeling guilty', possibly for having an imperial past, possibly for having a dominant gender. But I'd say that a much more important component than guilt is aesthetics: the culture or the individual who values good differences must have an idea of beauty. It must be a concept of beauty which goes beyond the narcissistic. They, not we, are beautiful.

One example of this is the difference in the conception of the word 'friends' that emerged in the run-up to the Iraq war. The US said to Europe 'Friends support one another. Support our war. We will reward our friends and punish our enemies.' Europe replied: 'Friends can disagree and still be friends.' In other words, difference can be good.

People calling me a gender reactionary on this thread for expressing the opinion that the idea of femininity should be valued as a 'good other' is like Rumsfeld calling France and Germany 'old Europe' because they refuse to go along with the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq.

Now, I realise that what disturbs people is the charge of 'essentialism'. Why should femininity, as it's been constructed throughout history, a history containing many humiliations at the hands of men, be a fixed essence? A woman can be anything, right? Iraq can be anything, right? Why should we respect some vision of Iraq as fixed, when in fact our idea of its difference, looked at more closely, is the sum of our interventions in its history, alternating with its desperate, failed attempts to consolidate some kind of identity in the face of our domination?

I think the answer is, we have to choose the lesser of two evils. We can disregard history and essence, but if we do that we trash good difference, memory, culture and identity. And we don't have the right to do that, even if we had a lot to do with making that identity. Also, we cannot be so proud of treating the identities of others as fluid ('A woman can be anything!' 'Iraq can be anything!') when we merely mean that they have the right to resemble us more closely (the 'free to be more like me' syndrome). And we cannot be so proud of treating the identities of others as fluid when we treat our own identities as fixed.

But I manage to dovetail those very cleverly with the idea that by allowing the different to remain different -- by allowing the secondary term of the binary opposition to remain secondary -- we allow for its eventual and future reconstruction of the dominant term. The Christians, by accepting martyrdom rather than pretending to be Romans, take over the Roman Empire in the end. The working class, by becoming a class-for-itself, in other words accepting its secondary role, triumphs over its oppressors. The secondary term in the binary opposition gives the primary term its definition.

Marxism and deconstruction are not incompatible with Romanticism.

It is, however, 'trickledown' when a former Republican still uses Republican catchphrases even when he's supposedly a Democrat.

This is the opposite of what you want to argue about gender and the opposite of what you're calling 'good difference'. The whole point about becoming a class-for-itself is that it escapes the definitions and organisation principles of the bourgoisie - under which it is a class but not a class-for-itself. Your idea of 'good difference' is of femininity-for-the-other not femininity-for-itself. Or femininities for themselves.

'Good difference' is a perfect example of what I said about your conditional love of femininity. (Not a definition, btw, just an analysis of what you were saying.) You like to think that its good and different, but my analysis of what you are saying is that it is conditional: it remains good only as long as it is fixed in the mould of the other.

No, that analysis is ahistorical and un-dialectical. The working class, in becoming a class-for-itself, takes a historical perspective and realises its 'victimhood' at the hands of the dominant classes. It is not a matter of escaping bourgeois ways of thinking, but of using them against the bourgeois system. You study, you analyze. You use the British Library and the statistics produced by capitalism itself and by the government of the day to establish that abuse exists, that lives are shortened by foul conditions, that the working class is oppressed and exploited for someone else's profit.

What is the Communist Manifesto but a call for workers to realise that they are 'in chains' and 'in a struggle'? In a sense, it is a call for workers to know their place -- but not accept it. You cannot 'escape' into class consciousness. But you can 'awaken' into it.

Your idea of 'good difference' is of femininity-for-the-other not femininity-for-itself. Or femininities for themselves.

Those things cannot be separated, because they are part of the long dialectic between genders. There is no place outside history where there could be 'femininity-for-itself'. Most fictional attempts to imagine such a thing show only the moment when these societies encounter maleness: when Amazons castrate captured males, when Circe lures Odysseus and his crew, when Mastoianni enters the City of Women.

Good difference in terms of the Hegelian dialectic is allowing the Other to be -- and to think of itself as -- the antithesis to one's own thesis. To be different enough to have an identity, a series of distinctions which give it a shape, but not different enough so that it's unrecognisable, unconnected, meaningless, alien, beyond all negotiation in some notional autistic state. Women would really have to be from Venus to be for-themselves in that sense.

I think Good Difference as I'm describing it is best understood as an etiquette, a series of behaviours by which we have learned to negotiate our relationship with a defined difference (like 'the female') whose real contours are merely acknowledged metonymically by the codes of the etiquette. For instance, gender relations in France to this day reflect some of the etiquette codes of Courtly Love:

Courtly Love: The... system of love and adoration developed in Northern France during the late 12th century. Under this system, the lover, who pursued his illicit and passionate love relentlessly, was ennobled by the experience. Some writers claimed that the search itself was enough to improve the character of the lover, while others maintained that he would be a fool to pursue such a venture without recompense, be it a smile or a look or perhaps more intimate conclusion. In general courtly love took place outside the boundaries of marriage, which is one of the reasons that the medieval church took such strong objections to it.

He's not so sanguine about courtly love as you are, Momus. Love (courtly love and forms of love that follow it) has a ticklish history and the emergence of love as a code of behaviour is not stripped of the sort of asymmetry I was trying to describe in your normative idea of femininity. Stalkers are an extreme example of how love is imposed and need not be reciprocal, but all love has some of this character: you don't love someone only by having a contract with them that they will love you too!

In Luhmann, and in Barthes for that matter, love is at its most delicate (and most utopian) when it is inflected with masochism - that is, when love is a form of surrender, to be subjected to something for which the lover cannot be held accountable. This kind of love does not reify the beloved (this is not my term, its Barthes') but in fact gives himself over to the beloved. In other words, good difference is not what love is about. Losing yourself in the beloved is what love is about.

Here's something worth considering from Luhmann:

In the Middle Ages the notion, derived from Antiquity, that the passion of love was a type of disease was still understood in completely medical terms, a symptomology had been developed and forms of therapy (such as coitus) were suggested as treatment. Sexuality was looked upon as normal physical behaviour, whereas passion was considered a disease. By the seventeenth century all that remained of this view was the metaphor.

Modernity's problem with sincerity and its incommunicability only arises once the relation between the author and what he communicates is no longer conceived as natural or as technically produced, but rather as a forgery of existence. At this point, declarations of love are no longer possible.

There is no basis for love

His final thought is this:

Every attempt to see-through the other person ends up in empty space, in the unity of true and false, of sincere and insincere, a vacuum for which there are no criteria of judgement. Therefore, it is not possilbe to say everything. Transparency only exists in the relationship of system and and system, and by virtue, so to speak, of the difference of system and environment, which constitutes the system in the first place. Love and love alone can be such transparency

But you said 'emerging with Romanticism' and associated it with capitalism! Whereas in the feudal 12th century the kind of separations you talk about are more associated with monks and nuns than the separation of work spheres (presumably you mean 'the division of labour'). Different time zones indeed!

I think the courtly troubadour serenading a dame was perfectly aware that the way his lady 'produced herself' and the way he presented his courtship were 'forgeries' too. It was, as I say, an etiquette of 'plaisanterie', perfectly aware of, and untroubled by, its own theatricality.

This is why your second point is misguided - its the revival of courtly love in Romanticism that we've inherited as romantic love, not the actual historical practices of courtly love. Too much has changed for those codes to function.

But it is not entirely true. You have to remember that codes are not masks (one of your terms, I believe); codes are the way that we get access to the world and to each other. Actually, codes are the way we get access to ourselves. Just because you have a code doesn't mean you are dealing in forgeries. It is only when modernity suspends its codes - like modernist art putting pictorial space in suspension or in inverted commas, so to speak - that forgery becomes conspicuous.

I think actually the "we" you continue to articulate is "Momus."

that's exoticism isn't it?

That's the meta-amswer. But I would say that his work isn't good art at all. It might be good fashion photography or good something else, but in terms of contemporary art, his work is technically, culturally and socially conservative. Of course, those people who love art to be a beacon of anachronistic values might love his work for the same reasons that I find it irrelevant.