Cit 1 ** “a well drawn figure penetrates you of a completely foreign pleasure on the subject. Voluptuous or terrible, this figure owes its charm only with the arabesque which it cuts out in space. The members of a martyr whom one skins, the body of a pâmée nymph, if they are learnedly drawn, comprise a kind of pleasure which the subject does not enter for nothing; if for you it is different, I will be forced to believe that you are a torturer or a libertine”. Baudelaire, 1863. “The work of the life of Eugene Delacroix”, 1863, complete Works, Gallimard, T II, p 753, Talking about Delacroix, B proposes a formal vision to the extreme of it, where the subject is practically erased in its treatment, disappearing behind the abstract lines. Still, the two subjects given as examples quit significant, On one hand, the body of an exorché, skinned body, fascinating and repulsing in the same time, on the other hand the body of a nude goddess, source of erotic shiver and sensual pleasure. Put together those two examples are the two components of the erotic pleasure, wherever confessed or not.. If one tries to apply this remark to the bodies of Bellmer one remains in indecision. Would the pleasure which one tests be that of a libertine or that of a torturer? Or, perhaps as Baudelaire wishes it, the pleasure is about a sight of a perfect arabesque, which happened to be also a contour, occasionally designing a body. One could naively believe in the formal assumption, if one listens to Bellmer stating to want “to follow all gently the contour of the small valleys, to taste the pleasure of the round-offs, to make pretty things”. Listening to Bellmer one could be tempted to believe naively that the formal, abstract vision of his paintings the true reason of our pleasure. “ I would like “ But, we know, and what happened here during the Bellmer exhibit is the best proof, that those beautiful landscapes, those nices things, are primely nudes bodies which cannot live us without reaction. Nevertheless, the description of Baudelaire, gives us a perfect definition of the ambiguity of Bellmer work, where one is taken apart between the virtuosity of the perfect line, the beauty of a stereotyped and idealized body and the violence of the penetration of those body One can speak of multiple entrances. This dosage full of skill and perfectly controlled by Bellmer is an example of an artist who is a libertine who is maybe event a butcher, but a butcher who was formed with a perfectly esthetique and sophisticated education. In this fragile equilibrium, the part which is the most spectacular or the most surprising is the capacity of the German artiste to introduced himself inside the body. We all know that for centuries the female body was a source of an esthetique and sensual pleasure. The eye of the spectator hesitated between the artistique contemplation and the erotique delight. With those bodies, the surface of the painting and the epidermal of the skin became one, the eye was surfing like a scopique caress, without penetrating within. The delights of the skin do not became the delights of the flesh, the perception il always condemned to stay on the bounderies of the object. Immaculate object of desire, always smooth like a mirror, without a touch, without a stain, without hands. Object which reminds us the famous description used by Roland Barthes for the Dutch still lives
Apparently, Bellmer succeeded to change this situation and to penetrate under the skin. The painter propose a radiography of the corps, of which the envelope is no more water proof and where the eye which normaly only (slides or slips) or palpates the forms, is exploring the most intime interior. In his anatomist scrutiny, which shows the normally hidden parts, the hand of Bellmer becomes a tool that goes under de different layers of the body and unveils the unknown’s parts of the human architecture. The hand ? Not realy. One could belive so but actually the painters says something different. “I want to see with my hand”, declares Bellmer, a sentence which shows us the whole ambition but also the limits of his project. Actualy, the drive for this erotic project is not the one of ulimited tactility but of a devorign scopique pulsion In this task, the hand is replaced by an detachable eye “” which is sent as a guide under the different folds of the skin, inside the openings orifices of the body and which scrutinizes in the obscurity of anatomiques cavities. $$$ Even when the hand is apparent, it’s hardly touching the body-flower, or only caressing it. $$ Hands of Semi-bitchy girls blooming in furrows in the ground For a visual journey througt the body in the best conditions, Bellmer represents them with what we can name “law density”. Those bodies, entirely graphics, let the ocular rays to go through their interstices (chinks). We can say that his anatomique disection practice by Bellmer are not with a scalpel but with laser rays, which penatrate anywhere without living a trace. $$ Those ghost-like architecture Tranparents, multiples, opened seems floating on the surface, without any pricise indication on their location. Thanks to this structure, superposed and transparent, the precision of the anatomies is constantly disturbed and we obtain what I would call “figures of incertitude” open and closed in the same time. With Bellmer as with Dali the woman is spectrale Dali “I declare that any new sexual attraction from women will come of the possible use of their spectral capacity and resources, that is to say from their possible dissociation, their carnal and luminous decompositions…spectral woman can be taken apart…Woman will become spectral by the disarticulation and deformation of their anatomy”. Spectrale, or woman-flower, a body which doesn’t shows any separation between the skin and the flesh. Or, in others terms, one have the feeling that Bellmer peels slowly and delicately the differents layers of the skin, like the petals of a flower. One cans see this flower with this collage “in souvenir to my wife” $$ with this small knife With Bellmer, its normaly a rose, which appears sometime even with the Popupé$$ Of course, the flower metaphor is not very original wee find it quite frequantely used by surrealists. Woman flower or woman mille feuille if one is playins with an ather title of B mille filles Bellmer uses the rose sometime in the title Rose ouverte la nuit$$ But this drawing shows us again what I would call the estetic limits of B. One can see the the inside of the body, the organs seems undisturbed, perfectly designed, without any traces of flash blood or the liquids. The inside of the body with Bellmer looks dematerialize us much as the outside. One cans see clearly the difference between those undisturbed bodies and for example those bodies made in wax by Clemente Susini where the guts, the womb are shown, and its an understatement, in a anpateising way. Le beau corps is opening himself and showing his repulsing part the sticky and vicious flesh.(obviosely, this way of representations illustrates perfectly the canoniuqes texts of the church about the female body) The figures of Bellmer seems far away of those butcher bodies. Strangely enough they concides with the image of the ecorché as wee know it $$ The écorché are shown as it was possible to skinn the epidermis like an external envelope, a delicate cloth without distubign the order and the integrity of the inside organs. $$$In some way the images of Bellmer reminds me this Ap by Christian Schand where the skin looks lide a swwet shirt that one can take of without any effet on the rest of the body. This strategy used by Bellmer, is probably a way to defend himself against the informe flesh, against what Bataille calls “the violent discord of the organs” where “the eyes are structed by what whas impossible to see with, as a reaction, a fear and a grin (I would like to remind you that the fear and the grin, this hidden agresivity was the public reaction in front of the Olympia of Monet, this unidealised, impure woman Olympia, of whom Dubuffet gives us a defintive version with a crushed and scabby, body, covered with a signs of violence, a far way from the perfect bodies of Bellemer In his reaction against the idealization of the erotic, idealization always linked with the visuality, this “mise en distance” Bataille, as you know, advocates “the knowledge by contact”. The tactility, the importance of the bas, the basness, meaning the materials and the informal, is for the philosopher the only way to experienced the extreme. For Bataille, the body is not a harmonious organism but an organisme always in contact with of defiguration, of violence, Informe substance, tactility, disgust, all those composants do not have their entry (droit d’entrée) in the immaterial and graphic univers of Bellmer. His production is the one of high precision mechanism, which shows us the fonctionning of desire the same way that an ingeener would shows us a perfect protytype of a machine, ignoring any obstacle that may appear while the fonctionning. $$$Mitrailleuse In other words, the woks of B are without any friction, without any resistance. For those between you that speaks French those works remindes mi the name of the porno movie(ca glisse dans le pays de merveilles) Following this logique the ideal woman is a perfect sample of the anatomie of desire much better, says Bellmer, than the practice of love. This practice of love, the sexual act, we know, introduces the violence, the agressivity, the tear or the rip in the body, all those signs are totally absent in the worldof the german artiste. Bellemr, in fact, seems incapable of destruction, incapable of showing the material, the flesh. The sexual virtuosity is of the same type that the graphic virtuositye, the trajectories of desire become the energy lines, fluid and perfectly controlled, a Well-oiled machine. Wieland Schmidt descripted rightly the work of this engineer of Eros as “cool and controlled precision”; Rien de dépasse. Of course, the organs are sometime misplaced or even turned upside down but more like a puzzle, a puzzle maybe imposible to recosntrcut but a puzzle all the same. The title of Eluard “games with the dole “ Jeux avec la poupée summarizes this situation. The figures of Bellmer are quite differet of those, for example, of Artaud) In a way the figures of Bellmer are expressed in the ball and socket joint, the mecanisme witch makes the second poupée fonctionne smoothly. Still, the doll, la Poupée, is an exception in this univers where cruelty and beauty walks hand in hand. The poupée, in fact, looks much more banal than the persons in Bellmer universe. The fétichistes components (shoes, sockets) are here less sophisticated than than the bootee that B is using for his figures. In the same time this body looks more clumsy, even a bit helpless, a bit broken, far from the positions of sexual acrobats of Bellmer repertoire. But, the most important impact on the spectator concentrates on the face, (le grain the sable) that disturbs the perfect functioning of the belmerien system; On the opposite from the bodies without a face or with a stereotyped face, Lolita looks like, the face here expresses a kind of distress, of anguish. Even the hairdo, always perfectly in place, looks differently, like a sign for a body that for once was not only transformed but shove, hurts maybe even assaulted. For this part, I do not agree completely with Wieland Schmidt who considers that in Bellmer word nothing is forced and the victim’s is consent to his situation, excluding any idea of a rape. I don’t know if one can speaks about rape, but what is sure that the poupé is probably the only body that to undergo what looks like a real violence, a cruelty that escapes from the mise en scene sophisticated and voluptuous, that always fascinates us but rarely deeply moving. I will conclude with a question. Is the univers of Bellmer still subversif ? In Whitechapell, more than in any other place one could hardly answer negatively. But maybe less subversif than it was in his time. Not only because of the shift in the society towards sexuality. More so probably because of other bodies, other form of violence and crudity, one would even dear say authenticity, that we have seen mine time (Dubuffet, Fautrier, being in Great Britany, one think immediately about Bacon and Lucien Freud and there are other examples. Strangely enough, and that will be the very end of my communication, some of the qui réussissent, me semble-t-il de montrer le corps de l’intérieur, mais sans cette violence, directement ou de façon métaphorique, sans la violence masculine. Dans tout ce contexte artistique des femmes comme Rosemarie Trockel, Annette Messager, Maria Lessing, Jana Sterbak Eva Hesse, Magdalena Abakanowicz,
Inside I 1967 1967.$$ L’abject, ce terme souvent employé à cette période, nous rammenne à Bataille. La réflexion sur ce terme, développée par Julia Kristeva, renvoie à tout ce qui repoulse et fascine en même temps, participe fortement au discours des féministes américaines. Le voyage de Hesse dans son univers propre est à l’opposée de toute idéalisation glorifiante de la corporalité. C’est plutôt le côté répulsif, repoussant du corps, avec un aspect glouant, visquieux, le plus souvent enfoui et refoulé de l’imagerie artistique, qui se voit mis en scène $$$plusieurs. Tout en évitant une quelconque visée descriptive, les allusions aux membres et aux viscères montrent la capacité d’Eva Hesse d’écouter l’intérieur du corps, de prospecter, de peindre ou sculpter à partir de son propre corps. $$Sept Poles Fabriquées à partir de cordes recouvertes de tissu, de fil de fer et d’aluminium, semblent comme couvert par un liquide visqueux, à l’instar des liquides corporels, montre un organisme qui a perdu non seulement sa peau mais aussi son ossature. Je terminerai par ce dessin $$$en quelque sorte un auto-portrait, qui donne la mesure d’un corps qui se vide, qui se liquifie lentement, sans résistance aucune. Une autre façon de montrer son corps en l’écoutant. and tempting in his cruelty and finesse Well-oiled machine, the ball and socket joint, tempting yet forbidding Pink or green at night desire and voyeurism pivoting Drawing Miniaturist precision the finely hatched lines and the elegance and refinement of the details joints various the heterogeneous spaces (the exterior and interior of the body) the precision of details proliferation of overcharged lines, laces and crystallized the body integrity is disrupted anatomist’s scrutiny the lines are sharps and incisive to fold and unfold in multiple curves wrinkled fibrous even liquefied instability and fluidity of the figure disintegration melting figure opaque and transparent Bellmer sets up a visual process of uncertainty a ghost-like architecture perverse refinement ornamental preciousness the feel of skin the voluptuous ness accumulation and repetition mechanism frozen fire engineer like drawings mapping out of the trajectories of desire become the energy lines. Contours patterns sensual pleasure and terror the spectator is caught between artificial and sophisticated Spinning top dematerialisation revealing the presence of other, equally definable shape clean dissection sterile operation without flesh or blood victim’s consent nothing is forced “cool and controlled precision”; Wieland Schmidt engineer of Eros Rose open at night Histoire de l’oeil 1946