Banksy time and again creates tasty and adequate images like that of Leanne the chambermaid, the Bomb Hugger, the Radar Rat or the black girl that overpaints the swastika on the wall that Banksy had painted there before. He is quick and handy to react to stuff like the corona crisis and he wants to show to people in distress that someone is there, someone cares for them, someone wants to bring a little relief to them. Occassionally he creates iconic images like the Balloon Girl. He acts like a very good publicity agency. One of that kind that time and again receives prizes for very good and creative adverstisements and advertisement stunts. What he does is creative, but not abysmally creative. It is a bit superficial, but not very superficial. This is a trap he skillfully avoids. If there are complex global or social issues, Banksy will adress them in a simplistic way. He acts like a world conscience. Like a single individual that cleans the atmosphere. Jeff Koons said that when he had to visit a modern art exhibition at school it had irritated him so much that he felt he never would want to have anything to do with art in his life. Based on that, he later decided to do art that will not unsettle people and will never make them uncomfortable with themselves. Banksy does not seem to be far from that either. As it appears, Banksy, in general, wants to make people feel good and comfortable with themselves. In a way that they do not really need to change or to grow: they are more or less super just the way they are. Including their aptitude to be concerned over global problems, war, racism or inequality. People, in general, are very concerned over global problems, war, racism or inequality. Never underestimate their capacity of people to be concerned over such issues. If this still does not make you feel good and feel very, very comfortable with yourself, then, well, it is quite likely that Banksy will start sucking your dick or give you a foot masssage. He will do everything in his power to make you feel good. Like his graffitis are often showing children, Banksy also does art that is interesting for children, and for the whole family. His Dismaland – A Family Theme Park Unsuitable for Children is particularly enteraining for children. That is no mean achievement, of course. Banksy is also good to the art world. In somehow mysterious and therefore interesting ways that can be talked about (without the need for more sophiticated intellectual analysis nor knowledge) he acts like a sparring partner to the art industry. Today´s art world likes to question, critisise and subvert itself (especially it delights on „institutional critique“) because it is insecure as the true creative potency within art (that is identical to itself and complex enough in order not to permanently need to „critisise“ and „question“ itself) has withered for some unknown reasons. Therefore the art world is in need to do something else. Not least as there is a lot of money involved in it. Banksy´s stunt to have his own artwork destroyed at a Sotheby´s auction further increased its market value. Not a bad desicion. There´s a film about Banksy called Exit Through the Gift Shop. I haven´t seen it, but I have seen the gift shop at the current Banksy Wanderzirkus exhibition. It´s a huge gift shop, and you can buy even a Banksy lavatory seat there. If you´re an artist and people like your stuff and want to buy it, that´s cool. Turn it into a commodity, no problem. However, and especially if you drive it to such extends, it will interfere a bit with your anti-capitalist aura and contaminate it. If you willfully accumulate riches that way in order to donate it to charity, then it´s, of course, cool again. Banksy is nice to everyone. There is not so much mystery about Banksy actually. It is a well-dosed, meticulously constructed mystery, as it may occasionally appear. The true identity of Banksy is unknown. We will assume that Banksy deeply cares for people and their problems. Of course, he will also need to care for himself. There is nothing wrong with caring for yourself too. The mystery of Banksy however is that it can also be seen – in a non-contradictory way – as a publicity agency and a machinery that is exclusively devoted to increasing its own market value and widen its spheres of circulation. That is probably not what it is. But that is the true mystery that it poses.
Recently I have been to the Moco Museum in Amsterdam. The Moco Museum is devoted to the most contemporary art, notably to that of Banksy, and to present this art to the younger generation. It is full of stupidities, but I have to say that I liked the museum. It was a pleasant experience I still cannot, however, fully decypher. It took me more by surprise than the Rijksmuseum. I cannot finally decypher contemporary art either, but finally I like this age of apparently mindless oddities and idiosyncracies that colonise the museum space and that make today´s art. It is probably better than the age of Abstract Expressionism or Surrealism. Modern art was mysterious, but it was also identical to itself. Today the atmosphere is more fluid and probably also more enigmatic. Maybe art has never been as mysterious as it is today. It is probably that mixture between bluntness and underdeterminedness that makes it cosy and immersive. That it resists to be truly immersive although art usually calls for immersion. Its mysterious superficiality that gives it a light weight. It is an intellectual riddle and it opens the space of imagination, actually wider than ever before. A society that can afford to render its art so ineffective must have reached a very high level of civilisation, sophistication, rationality and complexity. It must be a very interesting and stimulating society. As always, I have failed to thoroughly describe it. Such is the essence of mysteries. Mysteries invite us to an ongoing journey.
I like subjectivities. When I look around, I actually only see subjectivities, that blossom, that vibrate, that shake. That are very alive. Like a five year old child live in a de facto animistic world. I have trouble identifying what an object is, since also objects appear to want to speak to me or try to establish a relation with me; which, by definition, objects don´t do. I stand permanently under impressions and I am permanently impressed. And impressions are subjective. They invoke the most subjective: your glorious mind. The mind does not want to possess. The mind wants to establish relations that make sense, it wants to establish communion of all things, subjects and objects alike. The mind is perfectly sentient, and sentience is the core of subjectivity. Since I strive to be mind, I only see subjectivities.
The perfect illustration for subjectivity and sentience is beauty. The perfect illustration for beauty is the feminine. The feminine blossoms, the feminine is always in bloom. The feminine always thrives and flourishes. I like to look at the feminine because it vitalises, it bubbingly springs from the below like the fountain of youth, like the source of life. I like to look, for example, at ads from the golden age of advertising (1940s-1970s) that depict women. Or pin ups from that time, notably by Gil Elvgren. The feminine is harmless and friendly. The feminine enjoys itself and wants everyone and everything else to enjoy itself alike. The feminine wants to create joyful and beautiful environments. Women are the better human beings, the superior sex. They embody dignity, grace, self-containedness. They enjoy themselves easier, they embody the pleasure principle. While men embody the sober reality principle, women embody the exuberant pleasure principle. They are not as raw and primitive as men: they are women. The elegance of their form; the elegance of their curves. Their bodies do not radiate the violence, the inadequancy and the threat potential male bodies do. While the male body has the surface qualities of wood or of plastic, the female body equals velvet or silk. There are people on Facebook with an eye for idiosyncracies and beauty, many of them women. Yet also these women prefer to post women over men when they try to post beautiful things. The feminine and the female form is the most universal signifier for beauty.
Sometimes – at present, most of the time – there are complaints about a male gaze, which is understood as an objectifying gaze. It is brought into the discourse mostly by women who are feminists and, most recently, also by men who undeniably beam with vanity and who want to show the feminists how progressive and how enlightened they are. I don´t know exactly what a male gaze is, because I am quite feminine, and I like it that way. Since I also only see subjectivity, I also have some difficulties depicting an objectifying gaze. The objectifying gaze is meant to turn something that is allegedly vividly subjective into an object, into something commodified, that is at your disposal. I don´t know how often such a thing happens, and how often men would look on women with such an objectifying gaze, or with such an attitude. Of course, stuff like this will pass, from time to time at least, in this sorry world – I should know this because I have studied sociology – ; but this has little to nothing to do with my personal environment, nor the people I know. It will happen somewhere in the shadow realm, or in the netherworld, etc. To me, it is something very vague. When people think they see some special kind of gaze everywhere, it is most likely so because it´s their own gaze with which they perceive the world and try to make sense out of it. So if someone complains about the omnipresence of an objectifying gaze it may be immiment that this person´s gaze is in itself the agency that abhorrs subjectivity, and instead turns everything into an object at one´s disposal all by itself. For instance, as it appears, the more some individuals care about gender, the less they seem to care about diversity (and the more the care about diversity, the less they seem to care about gender). This may be so because of their objectifying gaze.
In Helmut Newton´s photography, women seem neither objectified nor thriving in subjectivity. They give me a hard time. Because they seem to lack grace. These women seem to be free. They seem to be in possession of themselves. But they are highly unnatural. They are not enjoying themselves. They don´t seem to have any emotions. So, in a way, they are not even images, or icons. Neither way, they seem to function as a reflection on an image, some kind of meta stuff related to the image. (They form an imagery, idiosyncratic and distinct, though: a universe created by Helmut Newton.) They are neither present nor absent. Although Newton´s women are massive, they lack gravity. They are staged to be caught in an instant. Usually, an instant, a moment in art embodies eternity. Yet in Helmut Newton´s photography it is just something fleeting, instantly evaporating, a whiff, air. Helmut Newton´s photographies are not exactly memorable. Your memory will kind of throw them away in an instant as well. Because there also usually are no memorable shapes and forms in his photography. Although Newton is a master photographer, he does not display a language of someone who has systematically meditated about shapes and forms. His stuff is fresh and virgin all alike, yet it also seems that he drags his models into settings that lack any character. It always seems that his settings come ad hoc; such a spontaneity is likeable, admirable; yet finally it seems to lack fixation and being grounded. His models are staged in somehow tasty environments, sometimes elegant ones, sometimes in environments that are in some interesting and tasty way deserted. Your first impression would be that these women are in no way related to their environments, that they are not actually situated in their environments, that they are not rescued, that they do not thrive in their environments. The second impression is that they are perfectly related to these environments: in their mutual unrelatedness, in their mutual detachedness. Aliens in an alien world. So it all adds up to something tasty, something somehow interesting. And something somehow meaningless and senseless. The environments in Helmut Newton´s photography are meaningless and senseless. They´re indifferent; like the women who appear in them. Like the environments are senseless, the women are senseless. Since in Helmut Newton´s photography women seem neither objectified nor thriving in subjectivity, they finally seem senseless. Neither the women nor the environments tell any stories, or carry psychology. Newton says he does not give the models in his shots any psychology. Because the industry is not interested in psychology – as he hesitantly adds. Yet the industry is an omnivore that swallows up and devours anything. Maybe it is Newton who is not interested in giving a psychology to the models in his shots – and to anything in his shots. For one reason or another (maybe for this reason) Helmut Newton´s photography has provoked anger among feminists. That seems counterintuitive, since Helmut Newton´s women are obviously not powerless, rather powerful and determined, almost masculine ones, Tank Girls. They are not exactly objectified. Yet, in another way, due to their lack of psychology they are underdetermined as humans. They are not, and cannot be, exactly objectified since: how would you objectify a robot? That might be a bigger shame. Does Newton adore strong women, or is he actually some kind of necrophiliac? Helmut Newton says that he likes strong women; not necessarily in his life but in his art. When the leading German feminist, the abrasive Alice Schwarzer, accuses Newton (apart from being a fascist, a racist and a sexist) of deriving particular pleasure, an icing-of-the-cake pleasure, from subjugating explicitely powerful women you may find that ridiculous and as one of her usual antics, yet, upon reflection, after immersing a bit more into Newton, you may be more inclined to think twice about that possibility. Consistently, the Newton model´s eyes are unearthly. Their eyes seem to relate to the unearthly gaze that is inflicted on them. One does not know whether Newton´s models are alive or dead, in a world alive or dead. They are un/dead. Being un/dead however is not something that finally adds up. Between an insight into the purely subjective (or, if you may, the Platonic idea(l)s) and the objectifying fe/male gaze there lies the glorious ZWISCHENREICH, Mittelerde, the realm of normal, ordinary human perception. Yet Newton´s realm is so alien that it is not even located in the ZWISCHENREICH; rather, it is a shadow doppelgänger of the ZWISCHENREICH, that reveals itself when you crack open perceptions that manifest in the ZWISCHENREICH. I do not think they are the deeper truth of the ZWISCHENREICH, however. They are something alien to even that. They are situated in a limbo, in a state of suspended animation. Yet, to increase the irritation, they actually seem to be in a limbo of a limbo. Or so. Finally, Newton´s phtography seems to offer glimpses into another planet, with inhabitants even more inauthentic and detached from themselves than the ones that dwell on this planet (and in the ZWISCHENREICH). I like Woman Entering the Ennis-Brown House by Frank Lloyd Wright from 1990 though. It shows a very interesting women, who additionally appears to have perfect breasts. Helmut Newton says he enjoys being a fashion photographer since he likes to photograph women. And being a top fashion photographer gives him the opportunity to photograph the most beautiful and elegeant women of the world, in the most distinguished environments, most expensive clothes, best make-up, etc. And then he does not make out more of it than that! In a way: clever! A comment on the parallel universe of fashion industry and the zombie people who consume Elle, Vogue or Playboy. An unpersonal, an objectified beauty you have in the fashion industry. I usually cannot relate to the beauty of fashion models. My kind of beauty is when objective beauty standards are met by something that is highly personal and idiosyncratic. For this reason, I like, for instance, model Ryonen. Her beauty is very idiosyncratic. She has some 2000 fans worldwide after all. But they are very devoted to her. Ironically, like Helmut Newton´s models, Ryonen never smiles. So her fans call her the most beautiful robot in the world. (Also Billie Eilish hardly ever smiles; and her first compilation album is called Don´t Smile At Me.) The only occasion I ever saw Ryonen smile is when she was looking at a painting of Bouguereau (coincidentally, a master painter of female subjectivity).
Sexism, racism, homo/transphobia, objectification etc. are problems. But there also are other problems like ignorance, directionlessness, weak personalities, self-saturated mediocrity or inferiority. Given an amount of problems like this, ordinary human sanity in itself may be the problem. I therefore advocate hypersanity. Hypersanity means that you are able to see subjects and objects from many different viewpoints and to emotionally and morally relate to them in more complex ways. Likewise, the more you are able to let the outside world in, the less dominant your „ego“ will become and the less objectifying and the more rational your gaze. The supersane gaze, the all-seeing eye, that will also see all virtual aspects of things. With the transcendental gaze you will see a lot of images and virtualities popping up at any given moment; although there will be perfect calmness there will also be a lot of activity. There is one image that is the deepest image of all, the transcendental image that cannot be transgressed, that will pop up all alike in this ordered chaos, before it vanishes again to give way to something else again (but will reappear time and again); that will yet remain a ground, stable and unaffected. It will probably be a pin-up by Gil Elvgren.