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January 11, 2004
Gary, what you said about labouring and philosophy failing to readily synthesize made me think of the early days when I was training to be a teacher. While at college it was impossible not to be a radical and alternative student with a critical disposition a moral determination but whenever I was out on teaching practice in a school the theoretical stuff seemed to lose all significance. I remember that I was trying to read The Positivist Dispute In German Sociology, which at the time was quite beyond me, but anyway when I was away from a school I didn’t have any trouble concentrating on the game. In the staff room I’d get the book out and try to read it. It could get passed my eyes but somehow it didn’t get into my head. They were just sentences whirling around. It was hard yakka. (For Kristian, Hugo, et al, this is an Australian word based on an Aboriginal name for grass trees. For ‘yakka’ use the word ‘work’. I won’t try to explain how this comes about.) Later I was told by my superiors that I didn’t mix enough in the staff room and so I put the book away. I wanted to be good. I wanted to get through.
Even now I have friends and acquaintances I mix with at uni and they seem quite normal to me. It’s only when I bring any of them home or in any way try to mix them with my other friends that I realize how strange and out of place they are in my world. I guess this means that I’m schizophrenic. That’s okay. If health consists in having the same diseases as everybody else then I must be healthy. The point is, the intellectual stuff requires a certain environment. Fuck! This blog wouldn’t exist if we weren’t both hermits – urban and suburban hermits, that is.
I agree that Nietzsche provided Foucault and the French poststructuralists with the means to transcend Hegel and Marx. Here is where Bataille is different. He wasn’t thinking about things in that way. He didn’t want to transcend anyone. He wanted to give voice to all the stuff that’s there all the time but never mentioned, or at any rate not treated seriously. When I say that it wasn’t treated seriously, I mean it wasn’t treated seriously by the guys who think, basically the chappies who want to transcend Hegel and Marx.
I think Adorno and Bataille are close. Indeed, I think that Adorno tried to capture as philosophy that which led Bataille beyond philosophy. This may be Australian craziness, I know, but I don’t give a fuck. As soon as you all out there start seeing Adorno and Bataille as essentially on the same plane, you’ll start to get some theory that you can take with you anywhere. Sure, when you’re buggered from painting all day you might not feel like seven this sort of theory, but one evening you will. You get over being buggered when you have to work every day.
On abstract expressionism, I think that its debt to surrealism was largely formal or technical. As your previous illustrations have amply shown, Gary, some surrealist paintings look a bit like abstract expressionist paintings. But surrealism isn’t really about technique or mode of expression. Surrealism isn’t like cubism. It isn’t another modernist mode of painting. While it has its literary and painterly expressions it’s not really an artist position at all. The essence of surrealism is found in that concern of Bataille’s that I have already mentioned in connection with Adorno. Surrealism wants to bring to expression everything that our culture wants to sit on top of, wants to keep down and suppress. How it achieves this aim is irrelevant just as long as it achieves it. In the end this achievement isn’t a great feat. What is suppressed forces itself to the surface. You just have to get out your surf board and ride it in.
As you say, the stuff by Dorothy Tanning is nothing like abstract expressionism. Hey! It’s more like Helmut Newton than Jackson Pollack, don’t you reckon? I’ve put the together so that you can see for yourself.
Of course, one is a male vision and one female, but if we put aside their differences, what do the two works have in common?
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Bare breasts?