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Spotlight on … Christine Brooke-Rose Stories, Theories and Things (1991)

August 9, 2021 / DC / 8 Comments

‘In interviews and essays on her status as a writer, Christine Brooke-Rose describes herself as having “little or no existence.” In Stories, Theories and Things, where she considers her dual career as experimental writer and literary theorist, she says ruefully: “outside the canon no interpretation, rather as one (now abandoned) dogma had it: outside the Church no Salvation. Fish [Stanley] would add: therefore no existence”. She notes that although her work has been reviewed, she lacks existence at the “critical level”:

I am one of the many authors who have a brief existence at what Hirsch (1967), as opposed to Fish, calls the interpretation level (the ‘meaning’ or simple reading of the text as syntax, for instance by reviewers), but who have little or no existence at what Hirsch calls the critical level (the ‘significance’ or what others call interpretation, that links the text to other things/realms of thought: the world, that is, other stories, other texts). This can only begin to happen, for better or for worse, when an author enters a canon, however shifting, and I have a knack of somehow escaping most would-be canonic networks and labels: I have been called ‘nouveau roman in English’ and nouveau nouveau, I have been called Postmodern, I have been called Experimental, I have been included in the SF Encyclopaedia, I automatically come under Women Writers (British, Contemporary), I sometimes interest the Feminists, but I am fairly regularly omitted from the ‘canonic’ surveys (chapters, articles, books) that come under those or indeed other labels. On the whole I regard this as a good sign.

‘In Brooke-Rose’s oeuvre narrative and theory are chiasmic; she demonstrates how theories tell stories and stories tell theory. Theories themselves are metastories told about language and fiction in particular; conversely, fictions are theories that take narrative form; they embody abstractions as they create a fictional ‘world.’ In Stories, Theories and Things and Invisible Author, Brooke-Rose attempts to add weight to the unbearable lightness of fiction’s being and to the kind of speculation we call narrative theory.

‘This chiasmus of theory and fiction might seem to confine us within a closed circle of postmodern theory and practice that includes new techniques, but not the “techniques for living” promised in my title. For Brooke-Rose, however, new fictional techniques are needed to represent the cultural narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, narratives that must capture heightened constraint and loss. In A Rhetoric of the Unreal, she describes this cultural narrative:

Never before have the meaning-making means at our disposal (linguistic, economic, political, scientific) appeared so inadequate, not only to cope with the enormity of the problems we continue to create . . . but simply to explain the world. This seems to be the century which, despite or because of the pace of technological advance, has taken the longest, relative to that pace, to emerge from the mental habits of the previous century. We know that all the old secure values have gone, that a radical change is occurring which man must undergo or perish, yet we somehow go on as if, ensconced still in relics of nineteenth-century ideologies, in a way which other times in parallel situations apparently did not.

‘Brooke-Rose associates the last fifty years with a painful loss of our ability to differentiate reality from what she calls “the unreal.” Her novels mime the absence of certain reality, or of some crucial analog for what we used to take as indubitably real. Obsolescence and extinction—even the loss of the human archive—haunt her texts. As they rupture “the relics of nineteenth-century ideologies,” her fictional experiments are performed for the sake of finding new ways to theorize life and formu- late conduct in a new world order. The revival meeting at the heart of Textermination, meant to staunch the extinction of its attendees, presages the grand narrative of evolution told in her last novel, Subscript, which begins 4500 million years ago with a chemical reaction and ends with humans on the earth about eleven thousand years ago. In Subscript, con- straints on language, mirroring constraints on biological life, turn out to be glorious modes of engendering evolution and survival. Every one of Brooke-Rose’s fictions is a rehearsal for living under the constraints of a new world, one that is as much a matter of shrinking possibilities as it is of a renewed expansion. Yet, contrary to any melancholy implied by Brooke-Rose’s vision, her fiction draws creative vitality and moral inspiration out of the limitations it evokes.’ — Karen R. Lawrence

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Further

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Mss

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Interview

Q: In your essay “Ill Iterations,” which you wrote for “Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction,” you mention the difficulties experimental writers face when they are male, but you say also that the differences are compounded when the experimental writer happens to be a female. Will you talk about those difficulties for the woman writer?

CBR: Yes, although it took a long time to become aware of them. Once in Paris, quite a long time ago, Helene Cixous rang me up and asked me to write something about the difficulties I’ve had as a woman writer. Naively, I said, “Well, I haven’t had any difficulties as a I “woman” writer. I’ve had difficulties that “any” writer would have; can I write about that?” And she said, “Oh, no.” She wanted something feminist. I was a bit antifeminist in those days, in the early 1970s. I didn’t consciously feel that I had had any difficulties. My later revision of that feeling came from genuine experience. As I look back over my career I realize that, in fact, I did have difficulties, but I took them for granted, as part of the nature of things. From the moment I went experimental, however, when I wrote “Out,” and my then-publishers couldn’t understand it and turned it down, I did actually start having difficulties. And when I wrote that essay for you, I started looking back and thinking about it, trying to fathom it out, and I became aware that the woman experimental writer has more difficulties than the man experimental writer, in the sense that, however much men have accepted women’s writing, there is still this basic assumption, which is unconscious, that women cannot create new forms. They can imitate others, they can imitate their little lives, tell their love stories and their difficulties and so on, and they do it extremely well. I’m not downgrading that kind of writing. But if by any chance they dare to experiment, then they are imitating a male movement, and usually one that’s already dead. In my case, I always get the label “nouveau roman” in English because “nouveau roman” is, from the English point of view, safely dead and no one talks about it anymore. In other words, all one is capable of as a woman is to do what the men do, and not so well. There is an unconscious refusal, really, to look at what I’m doing in any kind of detail. Whereas men experimenters or innovators of any kind do get that sort of attention.

Q: What does the phrase “utterly other discourse” from “Amalgamemnon” mean for you? Do you feel that you are writing “utterly other discourses”?

CBR: In “Amalgamemnon,” it doesn’t actually mean that. It doesn’t refer to the writing, it refers to the woman reading and thinking quite other things until she has to switch back to talking to the man. In fact, though, I do feel that my writing is different. I haven’t actually seen other writing quite like mine, but it is very difficult for me to say how “other” it is, or even whether it’s any good. I can’t really judge it, so I can’t really answer that questions. I do what I want to do.

Q: But you did make a conscious decision at one point in your career to write the indeterminate novel, rather than something realistic?

CBR: What a strange opposition. The realistic novel has its own indeterminacies. But anyway, it didn’t happen that way at all. It was much more negative than that. I was simply dissatisfied with what I was doing. I had written four novels, which are really quite traditional, satirical, comic novels. I did experiment with time in one of them, which was written backwards, for instance, so that in each chapter the hero gets younger and younger. But that was still classical irony. They were basically traditional modern novels, if I can use such a phrase, in that the main concern was, like most novels, epistemological, concerned with reality and illusion. But I felt it was too easy. It was great fun, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Originally, when I was very young, I used to write poetry every day, but I soon discovered that I was not a poet; but that urge to write poetry . . .

Q: But you are a poet.

CBR: Perhaps, but I had to get around to it in a very different way. I then thought I had found myself as a novelist, but after those four early novels I realized it still wasn’t what I wanted. So eventually—yes, I do now write very poetic novels, more deeply poetic at any rate than the poems I was writing every day. At the time of this dissatisfaction, I suppose it was Nathalie Sarraute’s “The Age of Suspicion,” and her putting the modern novel in question, which was the first turning point for me, much more so than her novels, for although I like them very much, I can’t say there’s a direct influence of Nathalie Sarraute on what I write. Whereas Robbe-Grillet did have a direct influence, at least on “Out.” But I soon got out of it. So it wasn’t a decision to write indeterminate novels as such. It was simply a decision not to go on writing as I used to write. But the other thing that happened was much more important. I had a very serious illness, lost a kidney and had a very long convalescence. I fell into a semi-trancelike state for a long time. I was very much thinking of death as the meaning of life. And I began to write “Out,” which is a very “sick” novel. I think one can feel that. I imagine a time when the whites are discriminated against; the whole color bar is reversed. But the reason the whites are discriminated against is because they are sick, dying from this mysterious radiation disease to which the colored people are more immune. My protagonist is a sick old man who cannot get a job and cannot remember his previous status. This exactly reproduced the state of illness that I was in, so in that sense of protection it was still a very mimetic novel. But I wasn’t consciously trying to do anything different. I started writing a sentence and fell back on the pillow exhausted. I didn’t really know where I was going, and it took me a long time to write it. I was groping. So I don’t think it was a conscious decision. But then with “Such” I really took off on my own. I don’t think there’s any more influence of Robbe-Grillet on “Such.” I would say that “Such” is my first really “Me” novel, where I don’t owe anything to anyone else.

Q: Can you characterize that “Me-ness”?

CBR: I think “Such” is more imaginative, for one thing. It’s still, of course, concerned with death since the man dies and is brought back to life. Again, I don’t explain why. I get much more interested, in fact, in the impact of language on the imagination. I suppose it’s really with “Between” that I discovered what I could do with language. With “Such” it’s still a fairly straightforward use of language, but very much in another world with this slow return to reality as the man comes back to life, but he then sees the stars as radiation. And having hit on that idea but not really knowing where I was going, I then had to do a lot of work, learn something about astrophysics, for example, since I was using it as a metaphor for the world. It’s in “Such” that I discovered that jargon, of whatever kind, has great poetry. For instance if you take a scientific law and use it literally, it becomes a metaphor. Of course, this is a schoolboy joke. If the teacher says, “Weight consists of the attraction between two bodies, ” everybody giggles. But if you take it further and use more complicated astrophysical laws about bouncing signals on the moon, for instance, to express the distance between people, then it becomes a very active metaphor. Yet it’s treated as ontological in the world of the fiction, like a sunset or a tree. So this sort of thing, you see, isn’t a conscious decision, it’s a discovery.

Q: Is that how you would define the experimental novel?

CBR: Yes, in a way. People often use the term “experimental novel” to mean just something peculiar, or as a genre in itself (on the same level as “realistic” or “fantastic” or “romantic” or “science” fiction). But to experiment is really not knowing where you’re going and discovering. Experimenting with language, experimenting with form and discovering things, and sometimes you might get it wrong and it just doesn’t come off. When I discovered that there is great beauty in technical language (and this comes into its own in “Thru” where I actually use critical jargon as poetry), I also discovered that there’s beauty and humor in confronting different discourses, jostling them together, including, for instance, computer language. In “Such” it’s astrophysics and in “Between” it’s all the languages, the lunatic, empty speech-making of different congresses, political, sociological, literary and so on, and of course, actual languages, different languages, all jostled together, since my protagonist, who’s a simultaneous interpreter, is always in different countries. Discourse became my subject matter. So discovery is one meaning of “experimental,” and this would be, to answer your earlier question, my “utterly other discourse,” where the actual language is different from the language you and I are using now, or that I find in other books. The second meaning is to see how far I can go with language, with vocabulary and syntax, and this is much more conscious. In “Between,” for example, a sentence can continue correctly, but by the end of it we are elsewhere in time and space. And I chose an imposed constraint, not using the verb “to be,” just as in “Amalgamemnon” I decided to use only non-realizing tenses and moods like the future, the conditional, the imperative.

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Book

Christine Brooke-Rose Stories, Theories and Things
Cambridge University Press

‘The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose reflects on her own fictional craft and turns her well-developed analytic abilities on other writers fictional and critical, from Hawthorne and Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate those difficult border zones between the “invented” and the “real.” The result is an extended meditation, in a highly personal idiom, on the creative act and its relation to modern theoretical writing and thinking. Like her fiction, Professor Brooke-Rose’s criticism is self-consciously experimental, trying out and discarding ideas, adopting others. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognized writer of fiction and theory, and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other modern movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays. Christine Brooke-Rose, formerly a professor at the Université de Paris, and now retired, lives in France. She is the author of several works of literary criticism and a number of novels, including Amalgamemnon and Xorander.’ — CUP

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Excerpt

To be an experimental writer

I am aware that in this return to my main topic, the sudden juxtaposition of ‘experimental’ writing with ‘genius’ may seem to be equating the two. In fact I don’t even like the word ‘genius’ and have only been using it to point up a deep-lying contradiction. Clearly there can be trivial as well as truly innovative experiment, just as there can be trivial as well as important writing in wholly familiar forms. I shall not here define Greatness, or the Sublime, or Imagination, or Literature. But I should perhaps try to define ‘experiment’.

I have so far put the word in quotes, because it seems to mean so many different things. What is ‘experimental’ art, or an ‘experimental’ novel? Is it a genre?

People often talk as if it were, although most experiment either widens the concept of a particular genre or explodes the notion of genre altogether. Yet a writer, or a group of writers, is put into that category, as if it were equivalent to Science Fiction, the Fantastic, Romance, Realism.

For Zola, the father of a certain kind of Realism, the ‘experimental novel’ meant a novel which had been carefully researched and backed by ‘experiment’ in the scientific sense of verification (of slaughterhouses, mines, peasant life), or what we now call documentary. The narrative voice had to be objective, impartial, ‘scientific’. In other words, a new kind, or school, of Realism, called Naturalism, almost a new genre.

For Hardy it meant, as we saw (according to Boumelha’s interesting readings), experiment away from Naturalism, the ‘search for a form’ revolving round the problem of female characters, provoking ‘an uncertainty of genre and tone which unsettles the fictional modes in a disturbing and often provocative manner’. But the ‘experiment’ in question turns out to be (for me) chiefly Hardy’s odd but by no means novel manipulation of viewpoint and a curious ‘blend’ of traditional forms for different purposes (see Ch. 7). If this is ‘experimental’, then every writer who develops his art is experimental, and there is indeed a sense in which every writer is. But at least Boumelha is genuinely concerned with formal experiments as they are related to the themes of the ‘New Woman’ fiction of the nineties. Today, on the other hand, the word ‘experimental’ is often used by feminists to designate new feminist themes, that come out of feminine ‘experience’ (as opposed to ‘experience’ of mines and slaughterhouses), whether or not these create new modes or structures.

Conversely, in the Formalist and then the Structuralist periods, the underlying opposition was often felt to be Realism versus Experiment, that is, a complete reversal, with the privilege of seriousness on the ‘experimental’ side, since the presuppositions of Realism were being thoroughly requestioned. It is often forgotten that the nouveau roman, when it burst out in the fifties against the traditional realistic novel, first acquired the label nouveau realisme, and was linked to phenomenology, just as earlier literary ‘revolutions’ had been made in the name of a greater realism (see Ch. 14). Only later did it come to be seen as, and further developed into, a much more complex poetics, linked to ‘postmodernism’, but this was because of its radical changes in the form of the novel.

So ‘experiment’, although part of the tradition/innovation opposition, was caught up in that of realism/formalism — which itself had meant different things from Hegel on: for Hegel (and for the Marxists after him) ‘formalist’ meant superficial (Preface to Phenomenology of Mind), but for the Russian Formalists (much condemned by the Soviet regime at the time) it meant rigorous attention to literary structures and conventions, in other words, poetics. Thus ‘experiment’ is often regarded as ‘merely’ formal, tinkering with technique (conceived quite logically as something external in just the way Plato considered writing as external), tinkering with the signifier irrespective of the signified, the ‘content’, the ‘truth’, the ‘real’, and independently of our systems of looking at it, and even that such tinkering is not accompanied by any valid ‘content’ at all, let alone ‘value’. Baudelaire was complaining of this already in 1861 in his essay on Gautier.

Years ago (1956) Nathalie Sarraute reversed the realist/ formalist opposition and said that the true realists were those who look so hard at reality that they see it in a new way and so have to work equally hard to invent new forms to capture that new reality, whereas the formalists were the diluters, who come along afterwards and take these now more familiar forms, pouring into them the familiarized reality anyone can see. Sarraute’s reversal in a way goes back to Hegel (formalism as superficial), for it calls the imitators formalists and the innovators realists. But such a reversal, although expressed in terms of an older dispensation (forms to capture a pre-existing reality), is basically sound, for it insists on the link between innovation and a completely different way of looking, which is after all another way of defining genius, for example in science. Today one would push it much further and say, not that new ways of looking necessitate new forms, but that experiment with new forms produces new ways of looking, produces, in fact, the very story (or ‘reality’ or ‘truth’) that it is supposed to reproduce, or, to put it in deconstructive terms, repeats an absent story.

Both aspects of the opposition, whichever way one takes it, are as necessary to the continuity of art as they are to that of life. Both occur in all art forms across the spectrum of genres and subgenres, both can be practised and achieved by men and women of all origins.

To be an experimental woman writer

Nevertheless women writers, not safely dead, who at any one living moment are trying to ‘look in new ways’ or ‘reread’ and therefore rewrite their world, are rarely treated on the same level of seriousness as their male counterparts. They can get published, they can even get good reviews. But they will be more easily forgotten between books and mysteriously absent from general situation surveys or critical books about contemporary literature, even about contemporary ‘experimental’ (or, for now, ‘postmodern’) novels. They will not ultimately be taken up by the more attentive critics. Even ‘the great Virginia herself, who had the best possible environment in the Bloomsbury Group to be so taken up, and her own publishing firm, who was called a ‘genius’ by her husband and friends, not only became ill with agony over the reception of every book by the then predominantly male literary scene, but was not fully and widely appreciated until well after her death. And she is the ‘best’ case, the token case. Similarly Nathalie Sarraute, another token case, was nearly sixty years old when she won recognition, at the time of the nouveau roman and thanks to the label, although her writing was and remains quite distinct from that of its male representatives.

It does seem, in other words, not only more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a woman writer (which corresponds to the male situation of experimental writer vs. writer), but also peculiarly more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a male experimental writer. She may, if young, get caught up in a ‘movement’, like Djuna Barnes, like H.D., like Laura Riding, as someone’s mistress, and then be forgotten, or if old, she may be ‘admitted’ into a group, under a label, but never be quite as seriously considered as the men in that group.

Perhaps one of the safest ways of dismissing a woman experimental writer is to stick a label on her, if possible that of a male group that is getting or (better still) used to get all the attention. Fluttering around a canon. The implication is clear: a woman writer must either use traditional forms or, if she dare experiment, she must be imitating an already old model. Indeed, the only two advantages of’movements’ are (1) for the writers, to promote themselves (hence they are usually men), and (2) for the critics, to serve as useful boxes to put authors into. But women are rarely considered seriously as part of a movement when it is ‘in vogue’, and then they are damned with the label when it no longer is, when they can safely be considered as minor elements of it.

It may well be that women writers do not like new ‘movements’ and still shrink from declaring all over the place how revolutionary they are. Political women, and hence feminists, have had this courage. But, as well as ‘muted’ women, many artists, male or female (rightly or wrongly), evade the overtly political, and it seems to me that the combination of woman + artist + experimental means so much hard work and heartbreak and isolation that there must be little time or energy for crying out loud.

And here we come back to the canon, in the form of another ancient opposition within the idea of belonging: traditionally, men belong to groups, to society (the matrix, the canon). Women belong to men. And in so far as women, emancipating themselves, also behave in the same way, they are said to be imitating men (and so to belong to them again). All emancipation apparently has to pass that way, just as it has to pass through a ‘separatist’ stage to find its strength and identity. But every individual needs a mixture of withdrawal and belonging. And it seems to me that the woman artist needs more withdrawal and less belonging. She needs to withdraw, either from the man she is with who may be consciously or unconsciously punishing her for or otherwise stifling her creativity; or from society (ditto). She will try less hard to belong, because she needs it less deeply. Thus she will tend to belong neither to a man nor to society. At best she will belong to what Ardener calls the ‘wild’ zone, as described by Elaine Showalter (1981).

Showalter gives Ardener’s diagram of the ‘muted’ and the ‘dominant’ group as one circle over another, the ‘muted’ circle shifted slightly to the right (whereas in Victorian society the ‘woman’s sphere’ was conceived as separate and smaller).

Showalter points out that spatially and experientially each group has a crescent-shaped zone inaccessible to the other, but that ‘metaphysically, or in terms of consciousness’, the wild zone has no corresponding male space since all male consciousness is within the circle of the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language. In this sense, the ‘wild’ is always imaginary: from the male point of view, it may simply be the projection of the unconscious. In terms of cultural anthropology, women know what the male crescent is like, even if they have never seen it, because it becomes the subject of legend (like the wilderness). But men do not know what is in the wild.

If this is so, there are not only very few truly experimental writers of the ‘wild’ zone (to my knowledge only Angela Carter and Helene Cixous at her least self-indulgent succeed here, though my knowledge may be limited), but in theory they must also know, and accept, that they cannot enter the canon (unless of course men were to open their minds, and abolish the notion of canon). Except, perhaps, a female canon.

But then, the very notion of a female canon (the new geography) is a contradiction in terms. Feminists have not quite faced that problem, as we saw in Chapter 15, but I cannot deal further with this huge issue here, beyond noting the danger: not only can the new boldness of feminist themes seem in itself sufficient renewal (the wild zone perhaps turned into a new chunk of reality to be sold), it can also help to create the stamp, the label ‘feminist writer’ or even ‘woman writer’. As I have suggested, one safe way not to recognize innovative women is to shove them under a label, and one such label is ‘woman writer’. Women may feel that the dismissive aspect comes from men, but I am not so sure. Naturally it must be comforting to be backed and hailed by a sisterhood (a female canon) but that sisterhood is, with some few exceptions, generally so busy on feminist ‘themes’, on defining a ‘feminist aesthetic’ and on discovering or reinterpreting women authors of the past (rather as the Deconstructionist School in America paid little attention to the deconstructing ‘postmodern’ literature all around them), that it has no time to notice or to make an effort to understand, let alone to back, an unfamiliar (experimental) woman writer who does not necessarily write on, or only on, such themes, but whose discourse is, in Elaine Showalter’s phrase (1981), ‘a double-voiced discourse, containing a “dominant” and a “muted” story, what Gilbert and Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic call a palimpsest’. If the ‘wild’ zone writer is inaccessible to most male readers, she is at least appreciated by feminists. The ‘double-voiced’ writer (unless he is a man) antagonizes both, she is in the sea between two continents.

In his book On Deconstruction (1983), Jonathan Culler has a chapter called ‘reading as a Woman’, where he quotes Shoshana Felman (1975): ‘Is “speaking as a woman” determined by some biological condition or by a strategic, theoretical position, by anatomy or by culture?’ And he applies this to the divided structure of woman’s reading: women can read, and have read, as men, and have learnt to identify with a masculine experience presented as the human one. Today, women face this problem, and ‘try to bring a new experience of reading for both men and women, a reading that questions the literary and political assumptions on which their reading has been based’.

It would seem, then, that the androgyny that some men have claimed for all good writers at the creative end has willy nilly been acquired by women at the receiving end, but not by men, who rarely identify with women characters as women do with male ones. Whatever the case, it would surely be a good thing if more men learnt to read as women (even the wild zone), so that the bisexual effort, which they have metaphorically appropriated at the creative end, should not remain so wholly on the women’s side at the receiver’s end. Both should read as both, just as both should write as both. And one of the ways in which this delightful bisexualism should occur is in a more open and intelligent attitude to experiment of all kinds by women.

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, That’s what I’ve been given to understand. Oh, you’re incommunicado. How nice for you. Rock the beach. See you soon. ** G, Hi, G! Glad you liked it, pal. Which would I want? Hm. I wouldn’t mind the Louise Bourgeois. Peiqi Su’s ‘The Penis Wall’ might be a good prop for our haunted house movie. I hope you had a wonderful weekend. ** Chris Kelso, HI, Chris. Oh, ‘HHU’ is a good choice, thanks. Wish that graphic novel was better known, for Keith Mayerson’s genius sake. 9 weeks, wow, man, that’s … very soon. Are you doing all the solo, free as a bird things you won’t be able to do fo a long time so easily starting six weeks from now? Whatever that would be? Whenever life and your heart occasions it, Paris will be your oyster if I have anything to say about it, not that Paris needs my help. I have not read the Olympia/Girodias bio, but it’s been on my to-do list for far too long. I’ll score it. It’s super interesting, I imagine? Thanks for the gift. You’re too kind. Take it easy, sir. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom, excellent to see you! If a blog post helps a writer write that is always its dreamiest achievement. Well, I’m happy that the initial diagnoses of your physical woes turned up nothing to worry too much about, and I hope the experts whom you see next say likewise. Thanks about the new film. We’re so chomping at the bit get started on it. Have a swell week, buddy. Love & hugs back. ** Adrian Ravarour, Hi, Adrian. Hm, well, I’ve never met Tony Kushner nor hung out with Doug Sadownick, so I think you might be mistaking someone else for me? Interesting story, though. Thank you. ** Bill, Excellent. Yeah, her book seems to be a viral kind of thing because a bunch of people I know happen to be reading it right now. Interesting how that happens. Good weekend? ** Dominik, Hi, D!!!! Well, the no news is … I’m not sure what the right word is … impatience causing? Zac and I are dying to start working on the film, and, yeah, we’re feeling increasingly antsy. Hopefully we’ll get news very soon. The problem is the elderly Stones don’t seem like they’d be capable of doing a good cover of ‘Nancy Boy’. They are the complete opposite of daring, whatever that would be. But, yeah. Ha ha, I would have to wear organic long johns or something underneath the Cleaver pants or my allergies would get me, which kind of defeats the purpose of wearing them, sadly. But I could give them out as Xmas gifts! Love as a super gigantic child holding Paris in one hand and Budapest in the other like they were stuffed animals and making them kiss, G. ** Gus CaliGirls, Hi, Gus. Really nice to see you, sir. I’m relatively energised, I think, thank you. Have you been vacationing and are you revved up whether you have been or not? Thank you about ‘Simplicity Itself’. Yeah, it’s from the same time as ‘Sad Story’, and, yeah, I think it was me beginning to think of how I could make fictions using images, but I guess before I figured out that using animated images would make it possible without using written captions. What shape is your writing in response to the screen and hyperlinks taking, if you can say? I’m very interested, obviously. Oh, wait, you’re locked down, right, so ignore my ‘vacation’ question. Man, so sorry. I guess milk your loopiness as best you can? Does it have any muse-like qualities maybe? Take good care! ** _Black_Acrylic, I think Play Therapy put the nail in the coffin of my jet lag, and I turned a friend here onto it, and they said it made them miss clubbing a whole lot less. I’ve heard of ‘Red Dwarf’. Yes, I have yet to personally encounter a young Alain Delon penis equivalent. ** David Ehrenstein, Taylor Swift should do a cover version of that song. ** Steve Erickson, Good question that I sadly do not know the answer to. You’ve sold me on Matt LaJoie. My free hand (I type with one hand) is hunting for his stuff’s trigger. I want to see ‘Swan Song’. Everyone, Mr. Erickson has given his (positive) opinion on … wait, he’ll tell you: ‘I reviewed the entertaining Udo Kier vehicle SWAN SONG for Gay City News.’ ** Okay. Enough of male appendages. The blog now suggests you investigate the spotlit book containing essays/writings on writing by the great novelist (and essayist) Christine Brooke-Rose. She really knows her stuff. See you tomorrow.

Penises

August 7, 2021 / DC / 12 Comments

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Brian Kokoska Various, 2011
‘Rub Club (2011) is a grainy, black and grey work in which one young man – wearing a kind of eyes wide open non-expression – pulled at the cock of an equally deadpan gentleman to his left. The cool feeling of this rendezvous contrasted sharply against the intense physicality and expressiveness of the tongue sucking and limb twisting orgies of Kokoska’s work from 2008-2010. Even more sober was Honey (2011), in which viewers met the upturned face of yet another fit young man, who, with eyes closed and mouth hanging slightly open, held his own penis, which could just as well have been flacid as erect; the picture’s downward perspective limited viewers vision of the organ to its head, which squeezed over the top of a closed fist, and the accompanying scrotal pouch that protruded beneath it. Like Rub Club, this work was nearly monochromatic. True to its title, it was filled with washed out hues of brownish yellow, with the most saturated tone filling the figure, whose hair, eyelids, nose and lips had been rendered in white. At no point was the paint dense enough to mask the originating pencil sketch. The muted tones of both works corresponded nicely to the exhibition’s title, suggesting the plateauing of a hyperactive lascivious drive once rendered as an ecstacy laced dream.’

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Eldridge Cleaver Pants, 1975
‘“Clothing is an extension of the fig leaf — it put our sex inside our bodies,” Cleaver told Newsweek in 1975. “My pants put sex back where it should be.” The Black Panthers frontman and radical intellectual came up with the idea while living in Paris in exile after fleeing charges from a confrontation with the police in 1968.

‘He took out an ad in the classifieds of the International Herald Tribune seeking investors and manufacturers for his collection that outlined the wearer’s genitals in a ‘sock-like codpiece’. ”Millions in profits envisioned,” the advertisement read.

‘A controversial media figure and former Presidential candidate in 1968 for the Peace and Freedom Party, Eldridge took every opportunity to model the pants himself for the press, but few publications would print photographs of the provocative design.

‘Despite creating quite the stir on the 1970s male fashion scene, shockingly the penis pant was never a great commercial success. Cleaver’s questionable design did little to help his reputation with the press, who were quick to paint the former revolutionary turned fashion designer as an ageing civil rights activist gone a little … well, cuckoo.’

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Louise Bourgeois Fillette, 1968
‘The title of this phallic sculpture means ‘little girl’, an ironic and unsettling disconnect between word and object. Bourgeois has talked about this work in relation to her experiences as a wife and a mother to three boys. This led her to see masculinity as far more vulnerable than she had imagined. ‘From a sexual point of view I consider the masculine attributes to be extremely delicate’, she explained. ‘They’re objects that the woman, myself, must protect.’ The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe famously portrayed Bourgeois with a version of this work tucked playfully under her arm.’

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Fernando Carpaneda Man As Object, 2015
water based clay, wood, mixed medium, human hair (artist own hair), human blood (artist own blood), acrylic paint

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Judith Bernstein Various, 1973 – 2015
‘Judith Bernstein has drawn or painted at least 500 phalluses—of all shapes and sizes—over the course of her 50-year career. For her, the phallus, which in her work usually resembles a weapon or a piece of machinery, became a visual metaphor for “feminism and male posturing.” But, as Bernstein will tell you, not all that much has changed since the ’60s, so she’s kept drawing penises ever since. This week, as a man with a long record of sexist rhetoric is inaugurated as America’s new president—and as women gather together in defense of their rights in marches across the world—Bernstein’s big, bold studies of male-centric power feel more relevant than ever.’

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Tom Dean Cock Photo, 1972
‘“Cock Photos, 1972” consists of a set of archival quality selenium-toned b/w photographic prints in a signed and numbered edition of 12 plus 3 artsts’ proofs. A black linen portfolio contains the five prints which were originally displayed as photo stats at the Musee d’Art Contemporain, Montreal, 1971. The works were removed from the show at the demand of the police and have not been exhibited since. Each photograph records the artists’ self manipulation of his penis and testicles in close-up.’

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Napoleon Bonaparte Penis, 1821
‘When Napoleon died in exile on the island of St. Helena in 1821, his doctor surreptitiously took his penis during the autopsy and gave it to a priest, who smuggled it to Corsica. The priest was killed in a bizarre blood vendetta, says Tony Perrottet, but passed it along to his family. They kept it until 1916, when a British collector got hold of it.

‘Perrottet says it was put on display once, in New York in 1927, and crowds turned out to see it. “It was described as being like a piece of leather or a shriveled eel,” he says.

‘”The penis had taken on quite a mythic status,” Perrottet says. “It was in a little leather presentation box, and it had been dried out in the air. It hadn’t been put in formaldehyde so it was rather the worse for wear, a bit like beef jerky.”

‘Perrottet says the French government had been given the opportunity to buy what might have been the most famous sexual organ in European history. France not only wouldn’t purchase it, the government wouldn’t even admit its existence, he says: “They didn’t touch the penis. They wouldn’t have anything to do with the penis.”‘

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Wim Delvoye X-rays, Dick Series, 2000
cibachrome on aluminium

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Peiqi Su The Penis Wall, 2014
‘This kinetic sculpture consists of 81 erectable penises that respond to either a viewer’s movements or to realtime movements in the stock market.’

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Various Daggering, 2006 – 2008
‘Daggering is a form of dance originating from Jamaica. The dance incorporates the male dancer ramming his crotch area into the female dancer’s buttocks, and other forms of frantic movement. Daggering is not a traditional dance; it is of recent origin, associated with the 2006 wave of dancehall music. The activity of “daggering” has been present in Jamaica’s dancehalls for many years, but only recently has the term “daggering” been used as a description. Some argue that it is roughly the equivalent of the Caribbean’s “cabin stabbing”, another style of music and dance. Mojo magazine journalist and reggae historian David Katz attributes the recent popularity of daggering to a series of dancehall music videos and artists that promoted the style. YouTube videos of people performing daggering have spread the trend worldwide.’

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Taro Masushio Untitled 26, 2020
‘After all,’ the voice meanders on, ‘the cock, at least while erect, does not betray the one that adores it.’

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Voina A Dick Captured by the FSB, 2010
‘It took members of Voina (pronounced va-ee-NA) 23 seconds to draw a very large, erect penis on the Liteiny Bridge in St Petersburg.’

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Curt McDowell The Beatles, 1968
‘In his painting, all four Beatles have their chests cut open for an autopsy. Their remains are expressive and do not have the look of morgue meat. Paul clutches his abdomen, as though he felt the coroner’s incision. (Or perhaps Linda’s vegetarian cuisine did him in.) John has his arm around Paul, who inclines his head toward John’s. Ringo seems to be sniffing Paul’s armpit, or perhaps he is getting closer so as to be included in John’s embrace. Only George strains to get away, as though the prospect of a group hug was too much for him. McDowell painted this post mortem tribute to The Beatles during his first semester at San Francisco Art Institute, around the time he realized that his true métier was filmmaking.’

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Claire Milbrath Groin Gazing, 2014
Stylist: Mila Franovic. Assistant: Darby Milbrath. Models: Brandon, Martin, Bazhad, and Alejandro

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house of o’dwyer Untitled, 1998
‘This series of photographs captures images of Graffiti penises found in public space and civic precincts.’

________________
Cynthia Plaster Caster Jimi Hendrix Penis, 1968
‘Cynthia Plaster Caster made plaster casts of rock stars’ penises. Cynthia estimates that she completed 55 to 60 successful casts, out of the 70 attempts she has made. She began casting men in 1968, giving new meaning to the term “cock rock.” She charmingly confesses to failing on a few groovy people, such as Eric Burdon of the Animals and Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks. In 2000, she began to cast women, choosing breasts for their bouncy goofiness. Her castees, male and female, span a range of musical textures, including: Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson (of MC5), Richard Lloyd (Television), Zal Yanovsky (Lovin’ Spoonful), Jello Biafra, Suzi Gardner, Peaches, Sally Timms, and Karen O. She has even cast such unlikely members as those owned by Anthony Newley and right-wing radio shouter Bob Grant.’

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Gilbert & George Dick Seed, 1988
Hand-dyed photograph in artist’s frame.

_________________
Salvador Dali Allée Des Verges (Penis Alley), 1969
Drypoint

_________________
Norbert Bisky Various, 2007
‘The paintings of Norbert Bisky offer stunning imagery of young males being ejaculated on by unseen men. Many of his images are of queer culture; yet many are violent and not of queer culture at all. His gallery is impressive in its variety of ejaculatory imagery. Finding Bisky’s work online is easy: finding interviews, and then finding them translated to English, is another story. Yet I was able to track down some information on Bisky and why ejaculation became such a powerful tool for his paintings. These images stem from a child born into a German family deeply rooted in religious rule and communist oppression.’

_________________
Daniel Edwards Allegory of a Teen Sex Symbol (Justin Bieber), 2011
‘Controversial sculptor Daniel Edwards cannot get enough of Justin Bieber. First, he sculpted Selena Gomez/Justin Bieber as nude Siamese twins, and now he has created a metaphorical sculpture of Justin Bieber’s nether regions. Edwards’ latest Bieber piece is titled ‘Allegory of a Teen Sex Symbol (Justin Bieber)’ and features a symbolic translation of Bieber’s bits and pieces, with Looney Tunes characters taking place of his you-know-whats. Bieber’s goodies are represented with Sylvester and Tweety, and the sculpture is supposed to represent the over-sexualized nature of the 17-year-old pop star.’

________________
Sarah Lucas Beer can penis (1999)
‘This is a sculpture of two dimpled, pressed together beer cans. This sculpture suggests the male genitals, as the title indicates. She has made several “Been Can Penises”, but since they are all hand-made, they are all unique and different.’

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Ryan McGinley Untitled (Penis, Cigarette), 2005
Photographs, Chromogenic print flush-mounted to foamcore

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Marc H. Miller Draw a Penis and Vagina, 1974
‘My earliest forays into interactive conceptual art involved written language, but I soon began to ask people to make drawings. My first subject was ‘Draw a House, Tree and Person,” a standard projective drawing test used by psychologists. This was followed by the provocative series of penis and vagina drawings that started in 1974, and eventually numbered close to 100 examples by participants of all ages. Although the art dealer Ivan Karp deliberately excluded the series from my second show at OK Harris, these drawings are by far the most viewed section of the 98 Bowery site.’

________________
Evie Leder The Objects, 2017
‘“Evie Leder’s The Objects is a meditation on the body consisting of approximately thirty videos, along with a series of detail photographs and video stills. Over a filming period of ten days, fourteen men—a diverse group of performers and artists in the San Francisco queer scene—visited the artist’s studio one by one. Creating an intimate space and relationship between artist and subject, Leder gave simple, but deliberate instruction: stand quietly, breathe, stretch, open and close eyes, turn. “I asked them to imagine themselves as forms in the frame… the symmetry of their arms and hands, how their breath changes their body. I asked them to imagine us looking at them.”’

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Aura Rosenberg Dialectical Porn Rock, 1992
‘Aura told us a story of living upstate and needing to work on something and chose this subject matter—which she made waterproof, and would place in the trout stream where her husband went fishing.’

_________________
Raymond Pettibon Various, 2013
‘For his new show at David Zwirner, Raymond Pettibon has raised the craft of penis drawing from pubescent boys’ trapper keepers to high art. When ARTINFO returned after last Thursday’s opening to get a closer look at the expansive (dare we say, seminal?) show, which features Pettibon’s drawings and signature script scrawled and pinned across four large walls at Zwirner’s West 19th Street compound, we noticed that a certain phallic trend kept popping up in the presentation.’

_________________
Pablo Picasso Sans Titre, 1967
‘Sex was always a big theme in Picasso’s life and in his work, so as an impulse, which he had no desire to control, this is an important area to understand the impetus behind what he made. As a side note, Picasso watched a lot of porn in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, he said with the intent to understand the objectification of subjects.’

_________________
Richard Newton Touch a Penis, 1977
‘Richard Newton helped redefine art by putting things in the gallery that hadn’t been placed there before — food waste, aluminum cans and shards of glass. He once pretended to be a pageant queen who underwent a sex change operation, and invited a gallery audience to touch his exposed private parts as he stood behind a white sheet.’

Watch video documentation here

________________
Unknown Untitled, 2015
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________________
Paul McCarthy Up Down Penis Show, 1974
‘‘Up Down Penis Show (Basement Tapes)’ (1974), in which the camera zooms in on the artist’s upside down torso and penis as he thrusts his pelvis up and down, and you are left feeling embarrassed and ill at ease even if you are the sole visitor to the gallery.’

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Simon Zoric Cock & Balls, 2013
‘Cock & Balls demonstrates just how unremarkable the male genitalia can be. In this autobiographical gesture, Zoric offers and then revokes his own egocentrism asking the audience to suspend disbelief and imagine the artist walking around cock and ball-less. Adding insult to injury, the work has been exhibited on the gallery floor only to find people often missed it and therefore kicked it as they walked through the exhibition space.’

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David Shrigley Life Model, 2014
‘A sculpture of a large naked man who urinates in a bucket is the eye-popping centrepiece of a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Called Life Model, the artwork sits in a room of chairs and visitors are invited to grab an easel and draw the man, just as they would in a live art class. The results are stuck on the walls of the room, which means anyone who visits the NGV has the potential to become one of its exhibiting artists. The exhibition comes from popular UK artist David Shrigley, who is internationally renowned for his dark humour and simple but pointed black-and-white drawings. He said Life Model was the “art equivalent of karaoke”, in which anyone of any ability got to be an artist. “People are reticent to do it, but once they do they find they really enjoy it. It’s quite liberating,” Shrigley said. “There’s something precious about being an artist in an exhibition and being the centre of attention and this sort of dissipates that.”’

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Morwenna Catt David Cameron Voodoo Testicles, 2014
‘There was a flurry of unusual activity at my Etsy Shop today. I wondered why and then discovered that my David Cameron Voodoo Testicles had been featured in The Sunday Times in a little piece by Roland White. I’m really very pleased – not least because it might be the only way the actual David Cameron gets to see my homage to his delicate parts. I’d be particularly keen to ‘set to’ the crown jewels of Nigel farage. Do get in touch if you’re interested!’

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Karlheinz Weinberger Various, 1957 – 1974
‘Karlheinz Weinberger began to take pictures as a teenager. In the 40s, he joined the famous Zürich underground gay club “Der Kreis” and began to publish his photos in its magazine under the pseudonym of Jim. In the late 50s, he met young misfits on the street and began to photograph them, in studio at his mother’s apartment or during their trips in the Swiss countryside. Working all his life as a warehouseman for the Siemens factory, he devoted all his spare time to his photographic passion for eccentricity. For more than thirty years, Karlheinz Weinberger followed these young people, who reused the codes of Rebel Without a Cause and created inventive and provocative outfits. His series in black and white and colour follow rockers, bikers and tattooed misfits and offer an amazing portrait of underground Switzerland.’

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Elizabeth Berdann Good, Better, Best, 1988
Oil on wood, engraved brass labels

p.s. Hey. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. My prog interests were more focused on the ‘brainy’ stuff like, oh, Henry Cow or, yeah, Soft Machine, and prog-adjacent bands like Family than on the bombastic, muscle flexing side a la Yes or ELP or Gentle Giant, although I did see those bands live multiple times. I do think Chris Squire was a bit of a genius at his thing. Ha ha, that video. I do love The Buggles. I think their first LP is minor great. Thanks, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thank you, Ben. Ah, you’ve saved the sonic aspect of my weekend yet again. Everyone, Wishing pleasure for all of you, as I so do, my current wish is that you’ll happy-up your body and its interior this weekend via the new episode of Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic’ and ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson’s ‘Play Therapy’. In the maestro’s words: ‘Play Therapy 19 is online here via Mixcloud! Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson is back from the summer holidays to bring you Australian Disco, vintage Belgian Hi NRG and some wonky German Techno too.’ Hit it, yes? Bon weekend, sir. ** Chris Kelso, I definitely like when reading a novel is like microdosing. Man, your kiddo’s existence in the world is getting close. That’s so intense. I have room on my reading pile, yes, thank you. When people ask me where to start with my stuff, I often say ‘My Loose Thread’, so yeah. I’m very happy to hear she’s into it. Will do when I manage to get back to Scotland. Sure would love to. There must be an occasion/way. And you re: Paris. You really should see this vaunted place when you get the chance. A tour guide (me) will be at the ready if you like. Take care. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Thank you, pal. Oh, the fundraising is a mystery. We’re told money is being raised, but the powers that be aren’t giving us any specifics other than that they hope to green light the film in September. We have a big producer meeting early next week, and I’m going to try to draw out some specifics. Indeed about nice, animals-focused people. Especially with pigeons which seem like one of the more unfairly dismissed creatures. I’m going to spend at least part of today trying to imagine Crystal Castles unplugged, i.e. basking in your love. That’s a real brain twister of a concept. Love convincing The Rolling Stones that on their upcoming tour they should throw out their usual, oldies-filled set list and do a 90 minute-long cover version of ‘Nancy Boy’ instead, G. ** Sypha, Great news about the ease so far of your root canal. That is a surprise. Not that I’ve had a root canal, but it has an uglier reputation. Continued mega-luck, man. ** Steve Erickson, Whoo hoo, on your negativity. And, as I said, envy on the double whammy of reentering Anthology and seeing the Sharits double projection gig. I think if you do try Yes, and I’m not saying you should, mind you, I would do ‘Close to the Edge’ first. You’ll know pretty quickly whether you want to proceed to the other, mostly lesser stuff. Great list you made there! Everyone, Heed the words of Mr. Steve Erickson. Those words being … ‘Yesterday, I made a Letterboxd list of worthy films you can stream for free (which aren’t legally available on Blu-Ray or VOD in the US, as far as I know)’. ** Bill, Thank you kindly, Bill. I did not know that Bandcamp Friday had returned and, thus, alas. Cool you’re reading Siebert, and what a cool seeming book group, and cool yet again that she joined in. Rock your weekend, or at least fiddle with it. ** Okay. I really don’t imagine that this weekend’s post needs an introduction. See you on Monday.

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