Art and Cars and Sex

Cars can be super sexy and art sublimely beautiful, this then, is one red hot collaboration. Art Drive has been running for 35 years and BMW now has an extraordinary collection of customised cars, including Koons, Holzer, Hockney and Warhol, literally anyone art-pop has got their sticky paws on these voluptuous, highly charged machines and performed an automobile alchemy. It is the first time these cars will come to London and they are being hosted by the ICA off site at the Great Eastern Street Car Park, Shoreditch. 

Which one would you choose? As fine art, mine is Jenny Holzer's, so true Jenny, so true! Then the years of 1975-77 are rather special, though it has to be the body work of the cars and my nostalgia as much as the art, a really superb time in design. I've always wanted a boxy Beemer to boot about town in, jungle bass kicking in and general showing off. And in my fantasy garage – in my fantasy house with my kitchen island and infinity pool in the back yard – I'd own  Alexander Calder's (75), Frank Stella's (76) and Roy Litchenstien's (77). Call me greedy, but in my fantasy life I wouldn't have to choose. 

Don't miss it. Honk Honk!

BMW Art Cars is a partnership with BMW, London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and Mayor of London. 

Painting. The Holy Grail.

Nick Waplington and Alec Kronacker open painting shows next week. Kronacker's Life at Sea opens at Southard Reid from next Wednesday evening and Waplington's The Artifice of Eternity is at Mark Hix's Tramshed from Thursday.  I like them both. Kronacker (more here) pushes some fantastical nostalgic buttons of a made up history in me and Nick's is grotesquely persuasive on the eyes. Really looking forward to looking and feeling the pleasure that vision brings. 

I don't care what anyone says, painting is still the best art. Full-the-fuck-stop.

(Though, having said that, Nick did tell me that one of the artists in the group show currently at Hix individually gold plated a pack of Monster Munch, which is just about the best idea in art I have heard since Deller's inflatable Stonehenge.)

Painting: Alec Kronaker, House of Actresses' Legs, 2012 

Art Makes Everything Okay

I haven't written in my blog for a very long time. This could be due to me not wanting to share; or not wanting to share my thoughts with you, the unseen, un-trusted public that is. You're a funny lot, you others, and sometimes when we're twitching in the margins we just want to hide in the shadows, keep our cards close to our chest and not let you in. 

So what is to be trusted? Our pets certainly, sometimes our loved ones, always our inanimate and animated objects, but the thing that unites me to you – you other – that I trust in you is your art which is always mine too if it then makes any sense to me. I trust in you art, I have faith in you to always make things better. 

I was in New York recently and I felt alone and the only thing that made me feel better was searching out the art of others and in looking I found a unity and a delight and an 'ecstasy in communication' (1) that hugged me in a way only my mother can. That art was the art of John Chamberlain found at the Guggenheim, namely his foam sculptures, a honeycomb tactility bound tight, constrained in its being, it held me with it. Laura Favaretto's exhibition at PS1 also did something to me, and in particular her confetti works where something joyful, even a little humorous is at play but with a deep sense of unease. This unease was set free in a room where the confetti is blown about by industrial fans, the only thing I wished for however – though it was fun to watch – was the desire to be in the room with it; to have the confetti closer to me, to allow it to tickle my naked skin along with the air that it was intimate with.  I also got a sneak preview of Nick Waplington’s paintings at his studio. These are voluptuous, abstracted figures wrestling with each other, intimate yet in conflict, sexual but also vulnerable, joyful but somehow insidious – they’re paintings I want to live with; he has a show coming up at Hix’s Tramshed, so well worth a visit. And in going forward I want to bounce around in Jeremy Deller’s inflatable Stonehenge, Sacrilege a ‘social surrealism’ (2) where history is made plastic and the everyday is animated to a delightful hyper-real all encompassing environment. You can view where to catch it this summer as part of the London 2012 festival here.

I guess our taste in art moves with our innermost feelings; there is an aesthetic taste that is the core of us, but its also always changing dependent on our environment and our changing relations with others.  And when art works for you it binds everything together, relates one thing to another, and connects you to the world. This is the ‘ecstasy of communication’ that I think Richard Prince talks of, at least it is for me.

I am still feeling a sense of solitude, a fragmentary unfamiliarity with frivolity, a disunity to the real and at times an alarm with the seriousness banality of life – this will no doubt pass, and my mood will shift again – but it was nice to share this with you. I feel closer to you now. I'm still considering a pet though.

------

Photo: courtesy Nick Waplington

1. Prince, Richard, Thoughts on Spiritual America, 12/09/11

 2. Deller, Jeremy, Dazed and Confused, 2012


 

 

 

Bataille on Love

'A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love' Bataille, The Solar Anus in Visions of Excess 1927-1939 (full text below)

 

 

 

The Solar Anus

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.

Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.

Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.

And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car, a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.

The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.

These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.

Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus.

It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher’s stone.

It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements.

An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.

An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love.

A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.

In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.

Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager’s vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.

They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.

The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass.

I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens.

It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.

The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.

Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another.

But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.

A man gets up as brusquely as a specter in a coffin and falls in the same way.

He gets up a few hours later and then he falls again, and the same thing happens every day; this great coitus with the celestial atmosphere is regulated by the terrestrial rotation around the sun.

Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rhythm of this rotation, the image of this movement is not turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.

Love and life appear to be separate only because everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations.

However, there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement; in the same way, a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis.

Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them.

Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.

Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun.

The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form.

But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation.

The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.

But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.

The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.

Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.

The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis.

The sea continuously jerks off.

Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish.

The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars.

Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.

Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.

It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE.

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.

Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.

Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.

In fact, the erotic movements of the ground are not fertile like those of the water, but they are far more rapid.

The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its surface.

The Jesuve is thus the image of an erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind, giving them the force a scandalous eruption.

This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below.

Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.

The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens.

As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond the constraints of fecundity.

In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror.

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.

I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.

The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.

The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.