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January 29, 2004
Gary, here are several comments on your recent entries.
Yes, I have noticed that aesthetics is dismissed in Australian philosophy, in most analytic philosophy for that matter, as irrelevant. So-called ‘cognitive science’, the latest preoccupation of the analysts, reduces aesthetics to the physiology of perception, a matter that is not really relevant to aesthetics, as far as I can see. Oh well, if they weren’t irrelevant they wouldn’t put up with them in universities.
You write that the meaning and value of human life that was once a part of the religious and/or dogmatic metaphysics has now passed to the aesthetic. Shit! I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that. It seems to me true at least to a certain point but I’ll have to give some more thought and get back to you.
Yes, Newton and Hookesy both copped it in the last few days. And I guess neither of them got to experience the moment of death. What is it that Bataille wrote? The problem with death is that it only lasts for an instant. What is he pointing at here. I think he’s alluding to that point when the code of everyday signs (Klossowski) no longer has any meaning, when the social ceases to exist for the individual, when all the barriers in the way of the direct experience of reality are broken down. I’d like to think that this is what Goethe meant when he made Faust say ‘My greatest moment this! My whole life has been a preparation for it!’ but it’s not, although I think Goethe was aware of the zone that captivated Bataille.
Going on the photograph of the painting with Newton in the foreground, Courbet must have been an early feminist, or at least a representative of the female gaze. This is a pretty bald statement I know but if you look at female artists like Anaïs Nin or Catherine Breillat or Dominique Aury, they seem most interested in the genitalia, particularly but not exclusively in the female genitalia. From what I’ve seen, there are no cunts in Newton’s work, while in contrast, right from her first film, recently released on DVD as A Real Young Girl, Breillat has focused on the genitals. Breasts? There are some shots of them in the film but they are of minor concern. In both this film and 36 Fillette Breillat is interested in the young girl with the fuller figure but not out of any breast motive that I can discern.
I don’t go much for the feminist critique of Newton. It sounds like bullshit to me. ‘The female spectator can only lay claim to the gaze of the camera by becoming masculinized.’ What does this mean? Who lays claim to the gaze of the camera? We look at a photograph. Looking at a photograph is nothing like making a land claim. A female looks at the photograph and says that it was taken by a male, that it’s the view of a male, that it represents his desires. Okay. That’s true. Newton never pretended to be a woman or to present things from a female perspective.
But I don’t think he was a voyeur. Is Catherine Breillat a voyeur because she often focuses on genitalia? Of course she’s not. Let’s take her seriously. Calling Breillat a voyeur is just an excuse for not engaging with her. And why wouldn’t one want to engage with her? Because one doesn’t want to hear what she was saying. That’s how these feminists approach Newton. They’re prudes. They’re not standing up for women, as far as I can see. I think they are sexually repressive.
I agree that there are two Newtons, the fashion photographer and the artist. Perhaps there is a social commentator as well but I’m not really interested in him. I’m interested in the artist who expresses his phantasms. The more outraged, the more offended we are by his simulacra the better. As I said before, Newton is a Balthus with a camera. Like Bataille, he is giving voice to that part of reality we don’t like to talk about. Instead we scream ‘Voyeur! Voyeur!’
You say you couldn’t find the fashion images online where the woman gazes at a man's naked body as an object of desire. Perhaps not. I couldn’t find any such images in the fashion pages, but they are there in other more bawdy places. Remember The Full Monty. There seems to be a female gaze that is pretty much like the male gaze, if you ask me.
It always seemed to me that there was something deeply sexist in claiming that women and men see the world differently, that they are fundamentally different. And that is not what Nin and Breillat and Aury were doing. Their gaze, in as much as there is some historically specific female gaze, is surely a struggle with stereotypes (in the sense of Klossowski). Aren’t they saying something like, ‘What about the genitals? no one is talking about them. They’re kept out of sight’?
As you write, it is not difficult to imagine a lesbian artist appropriating Newton's photographic images to talk about the erotics of pleasure in looking and female visual desire. I agree that he had a Bataillean eye exploring the nexus where pleasure, pain, joy and anger.
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Re: "....aesthetics is dismissed in Australian philosophy, in most analytic philosophy for that matter, as irrelevant. "
Though 'analytic aesthetics' still has a considerable following in the US and the UK.
Re: "So-called ‘cognitive science’, the latest preoccupation of the analysts, reduces aesthetics to the physiology of perception, a matter that is not really relevant to aesthetics, as far as I can see."
Yes. The 'Third International Conference on Neuroesthetics' was held recently in the US. This is part of a report in the Washinton Post:
"Other neuroaestheticians, such as Rosa-Aurora Chavez of Mexico's Ramon de la Fuente National Institute of Psychiatry,.... combined brain scans with survey-style tests that are sometimes used to measure human creativity and found that the creative types who did well on the tests also had trademark patterns of brain activity. In the vocabulary of neuroaesthetics, they had "significantly higher activation in right and left cerebellum and in right and left frontal and temporal lobes, confirming inter-hemispheric interactions during the performance of creative tasks."
I imagined the following conversation in an art gallery:
‘Say. What do you think of that Van Gogh over there?’
‘Really great! Love it. You can just see it required heaps of activation in the right and left cerebellum and the frontal and temporal lobes, and bags of inter-hemispheric interactions…’