my heroes died of syphilis

ça sent de l'hystérie

Three ink sketches based on 19th century erotic photographs.

the genitalia of a female syphilitic

on the CAB

As Ms. Huberman wrote, brace yourself, vegetarians. I was invited to write a little blurb about what I'm doing in the studio at the moment, and I thought this would be just the thing to photograph and document on the City Arts Blog. Here it is:

What R U Working On?

Hysterical tongues, of course. I should mention that I was a vegetarian for six years myself, for what it's worth!

artist salons and openings, etc.

The pace of happenings and art and people here seems to be steadily increasing and some weeks I feel I can barely keep up. I'm documenting things a little more with my trusty Horizon camera when and where I can. Here are a few snapshots from Jason Hirata's opening at James Harris (also in photo: James Harris and Beth Sellars) and Rimas Simaitis' Modules now up at SOIL.

The rest of the photos are from Joey Veltkamp's most recent artist salon hosted in his temporary studio at Seattle University. The inimitable Gretchen Bennett hosted a salon earlier this week and we all drank port wine and sparkling water and shared cake and labored over iterations on the disco ball while whimsically discussing some of Marc Camille Chaimowicz' processes. These salons are just the cat's meow, and I'll be sad when they come to an end. The upcoming and final salons are not to be missed: Kimberley Trowbridge on March 3 and Katy Stone on March 8.

(Click on images to see larger versions.)

Considering a Sontagian, Romantic, metaphorical view of Syphilis

Now that I am firmly established as a dealer in syphilitic iconography, a few words on the subject:

For me, as a metaphor the pox engages to some extent discourses about genius, autonomy, and subjectivity.  Perhaps most superficially obvious and pertinent is the fact that many 19th century writers, artists, composers, philosophers, etc, suffered from late stage tabes dorsalis - a neurological condition that caused deterioration of the spinal cord and often manifested in a dementia that produced euphoric, lucid, manic bursts of creativity shortly before death - and the question of how much this condition affected their later life output is interesting to me.  It was an incredibly common and widespread disease until the mid-20th century (when along came penicillin), though discourse on it was kept to a minimum due to its connectedness to sin (its social stigma might be comparable to that of AIDS in the modern era).  

Susan Sontag wrote in Illness As Metaphor:

It is with TB that the idea of individual illness was articulated, along with the idea that people are made more conscious as they confront their deaths, and in the images that collected around the disease one can see emerging a modern idea of individuality that has taken in the twentieth century a more aggressive, if no less narcissistic, form.  Sickness was a way of making people "interesting"--which is how "romantic" was originally defined....Perhaps the main gift to the sensibility made by the Romantics is not the aesthetics of cruelty and the beauty of the morbid, or even the demand for unlimited personal liberty, but the nihilistic and sentimental idea of "the interesting."

 
In conjunction with the tradition of western theology (as per St. Augustine, for example), suffering, organic and mental, is held to be the manifestation of original sin and evil.  Certainly syphilis is a manifestation of sexual sin, even without metaphorizing, which is what makes the metaphor all the more cloyingly sweet if we are to appropriate it and build upon it, especially in the 21st century when the disease has been so long dead.  If our individuating sins are what make us interesting in this Romantic, nihilistic sense ("sovereign" in a Bataillean sense), then syphilis - not at all mysterious or romantic or grave as Sontag's favored metaphors of cancer and tuberculosis (she sets aside syphilis as a trifling, at best intermediary symbol next to these) - is a perfect little bonbon of a metaphor for the artist astride him/herself.  (An image which might lead us down a psychoanalytic path littered with phalli, mirrors, and lack...some other time.)  Syphilis' insidious, gentle violence leading to eventual fatality is analogous to the decadence of the organic world at large; its corresponding bursts of florid genius are analogous to the best intellectual and artistic efforts of culture.  On a biological plane, the disease encompasses possession on a miniature but totalizing scale: these spiraling spirochaete bacteria infest the brain and spinal column so efficiently that the sufferer is truly among the possedé at the end of his or her life.  This is nature in its purely satanic guise, as understood by the Romantics at least.

(I wonder if the artists of the 21st century might not eventually, stimulated by nostalgia and a penchant for old fashioned hubristic excess, begin decorating their groins with false bouquets of syphilitic bloom, merkins of disease, if you will.  Their groins will scream: BEHOLD MY GENIUS.  Like the aristocracy of the 19th century did when they swooned and starved themselves and made their faces artificially wan and inflamed with macquillage to better resemble the fatal men and women of literature and the arts, who were ever beset with that most romantic disease: tuberculosis.)  

These drawings are not at all a literal depiction of syphilis, which should be clear to anyone who knows anything about it (tsk tsk).  I'm working on a few very large and ornate paintings of the subject, but then I'll probably move on.  You can only draw so much of this kind of thing.  I have lots of texts and pictures on the subject, and the colorful, blistering, suppurating chancres are not really the easiest thing to look at for long periods of time. 

tongues (lamb)

On Catherine Clément's theory of creative ecstasy: "Escaping into syncope was, for them, a scandalous escape from rationality. But this removal from time and space can bring a great joy, an unlocatable but generalized elation which Clément, borrowing the expression from the British psychologist D. W. Winnicott, calls, "an orgasm of the self," different from but related to the physical orgasm....It is thus normal for the artist to be schizoid, to be aware of and open to an 'entre-deux syncopé'." (Michael Finn in Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Sciècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde)

(When a tongue, the physical organ in all its complexity and simplicity, is overtaken and even annhiliated by a superfluousness of nonsensical decoration, does this connote a beginning or an end, or is this diving right into the midst of the precious, baroque syncope? The same might be asked of a life theatricalized, aestheticized, and suppressed/expanded by excess, which contracts and expands with limited regard to history and its liquid, shifting politics.)

....this week in The Stranger

If you're in Seattle, grab a copy of this week's Stranger and check out Jen Graves' feature story on the artists who have shown at The New Guard dinners to date: Troy Gua, Gala Bent, Jason Hirata, and myself:

This was the first time in history that the pairing of an artist and a chef resulted in guests eating five flavors of pie—herbs and apple, bread and chocolate, pumpkin chocolate chiffon, chocolate malt, and huckleberry buckle—with large drawings of syphilitic vaginas on the side.

You can find the article (along with a few of Daniel Carrillo's recent photographs) online here.

Under some bright lights with Daniel Carrillo

I just got back from a photo session with Daniel Carrillo. He's shown his brilliant mezzotints and etchings around town before (in fact, he's got some work in the upcoming show at Davidson Galleries), but lately he's been spending a lot of time behind a beautiful old camera with a 90-year-old lens, making wet-plate collodion ambrotype portraits of local artists. The images are exposed on glass plates which are then backed with black paper or board; the result is ethereal, an image barely palpable and incredibly delicate.

Here are some snapshots taken during the session. More here. Emily Pothast recently wrote about her experience on her blog as well.

(In retrospect, I can't help but quote - and thoroughly agree with - Barthes: "This headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence.")








(photos by Damon Mori)

Rachilde (and hysterical, syncoptic writing)

ink drawings after the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière
drawn in one sitting, on the floor

*

je suis assez, EN ÉTANT, et si je pouvais finir le monde avec moi, je le finirais. ("IN EXISTING, I am enough, and if I could end the world with myself I would do so.")
(Rachilde, from The Marquise de Sade)

I adore Rachilde. And I want to hug Michael Finn for writing and recently publishing Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Sciècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde:

"Nineteenth-century doctors, usually well educated in classical rhetoric and texts . . . felt that they could "read" mental imbalance in the writings of their patients. The hysterical female, they noted, often had imagination, expressed herself easily and might have a literary, artistic, or poetic disposition. But her creative abilities were very likely compromised. Not only was the hysteric's correspondence verbose and unclear, wrote Legrand du Saulle, one often encountered in her letters words that were underlined or in capitals. Poor Rachilde! Her personal correspondence is littered with underlined words, as are her novels where italics stand out on almost every page."

Rachilde wrote in a trance for days at a time, on her belly on the floor ("l'état d'inspiration, anaglogue à un état de fièvre, est une souffrance, un tourment d'âme en peine qui n'a rien de commun avec le vulgaire appétit de réussir ou celui de le publicité / the state of inspiration, comparable to a fever state, represents suffering, the torment of a suffering soul which has nothing in common with the vulgar appetite to be successful or to garner publicity" from Le val sans retour).

julia kristeva on youtube

Julia Kristeva and the(/a) tic. I came across this video months ago, and it is still very much with me.