The Women of Gil Elvgren

Beauty, as it is out there in the world, and our sense for beauty, that is within us, serve to arouse sexual attraction, i.e. to foster the reproduction process. Therefore beauty is linked to the probably only inherent determination of any species, that is to ensure its own reproduction. Therein, beauty is fundamental and primordial enough to receive the praise it usually receives. Of course, beauty is also distinctly transcendent to this. Humans at least may find things of all kinds beautiful. Humans have a sublimated sense for beauty, and there are humans that have a more sublimated, or seemingly innate sense for beauty than other humans. When philosopher Immanuel Kant says, beauty is what provokes “interesseloses Wohlgefallen” in us, i.e. pure pleasure without any longing for attachment to the respective source, we may consider it correct, at least after thinking the argument through. We may consider this a “deep” and truly sublimated notion on the character of beauty. On the other hand, we may see this notion as an expression of Kant´s alleged frigidity and deem It ridiculous to strip off beauty of its primary functionality: to make us feel (sexually) attracted to something. Yet to beauty we might both, or either-or, feel attracted or relate to it with a distanced awe. Mathematicians sense beauty in equations (and consider it as an indication for their truth), physicists muse about the “elegant” universe. We may consider nature beautiful, or art, or specific forms, but that may be because “nature”, i.e. flowers or animals are beautiful to attract mating partners, and due to our sublimated sense for beauty, also we may be aware of their beauty, without feeling sexually attracted to them. Children, with their big eyes, big heads, small noses, etc. look in a way so as that we feel emotionally attracted to them. We also feel attracted to the sublime, though the sublime is not necessarily beautiful. We may be fascinated by what is ugly or fearsome. Beauty is a bit paradoxical, or two-faced, as it is both “objective”, but seems to require also a subjective note. Beauty is objective as it is the most average looking face, a face that combines the most average characteristics, that we consider the most beautiful. That is the objective beauty standard. Yet the beauty that we personally feel most attracted to, the beauty that we love, will be a beauty with undistinguishable subjective characteristics. The beauty that we love will not be a clinical beauty. It will be highly subjective, a pulsating subjectivity, vital, vivid, blossoming, overflowing. It will seem like being born anew every time we look at it, it will be poetic. The highest form of beauty is not merely the beauty we feel attracted to. It is the beauty that we love. What we love will deem us beautiful (even if it objectively isn´t). In the highest sense, beauty is linked to a pulsating subjectivity. Love is the encounter of two subjectivities. And beauty, in the highest sense, is the encounter with a subjectivity that deems us of objective importance.

When I try to think on the last things, the transcendental things, or visualise them before my inner eye, there will be a vibrant fluctuaction of images, and semi-images. That is how the metaphysical abyss looks like, when you gaze into it. Yet likely my final image of what is beauty will freeze and solidify into a woman presented by Gil Elvgren. Gil Elvgren (1914 – 1980) was the genius of pin-up illustration. Pin-ups may be seen as something to please the so-called “male gaze”, by presenting “objectified” images of women, i.e. women turned into sex objects, to gratify an aggressive male sexuality, presumably entangled with a masculine will to power. But the dominant feature of the women of Gil Elvgren is their overflowing subjectivity. With their vibrant friendliness they will kill any aggressor with kindness. They are what a human being should be: they are happy and they are self-contained in their happiness. Their subjectivity is liberated. It´s a light world they inhabitate, and with their light that shines out of them they melt anything that seems complicated or uncomfortable like ice in the sun. The world seems like a garden where the women of Gil Elvgren bloom and blossom. Their vibrant, blooming subjectivities even overpower the underlying voluptuous character of this specific world. Gil Elvgren´s pin-ups are by no means vulgar, the eroticism is tacit, the risque element is usually presented in a humorous way. Gil Elvgren´s women have personality and verve. The verve lies in their body language, their personality lies in their sophisticated facial expressions. Feminists like to muse that many men are too fearful to actually look into the face of a woman. But when he is asked about the most important characteristic a model should have for him, Gil Elvgren mentions the face, respectively a face that is highly expressive. “A gal with highly mobile facial features capable of a wide range of expressions is the real jewel. The face is the personality.”

I have some real reasons to think that beauty is feminine. However attractive they may get, men are too clumsy and unsophisticated to really be beautiful. Men want to conquer territory and occupy space. They want to thrown things around and they make a mess. The technological manipulations and the theoretical and practical artefacts that stem out from this behaviour may be interesting and intellectually pleasing (Schöner ist das Frauenzimmer, interessanter ist der Mann, rhymes Nietzsche), but beautiful they are rather not. Men lack sweetness and grace. Their curves are miserable and dismal. Above all, men do not radiate innocence. It is the innocence that makes the women of Gil Elvgren so attractive. I know women with a sense for beauty. Even they overly post images of women way more than they do of men. Taking all this into account, I finally experience that I react to the women of Gil Elvgren actually with “interesselosem Wohlgefallen”. A state of pure pleasure and bliss that becomes self-contained. What has its roots in provoking sexual attraction equally elevates and transforms into a lofty state of attachment-free delight. Eminent logician Kurt Gödel used to enjoy Walt Disney movies, especially Snow White, because, to him, it presented a world in the way the world should be. Likewise to me, my garden of delight seem to be the pin-ups by Gil Elvgren. A world populated by the women of Gil Elvgren is the way a world should clearly be.

In the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Erich Fromm distinguishes between the Biophilic and the Necrophilic principle, similar to Eros and Thanatos in the Freudian understanding. The Biophilic is life-affirming, positive, attracted to anything that symbolisises life and its growth process, anything that is blossoming, flourishing, self-sustaining, seemingly innocent. The Necrophilic tries to abstain from all these qualities, or openly opposes them. It is abstract, distanced, overly calculating and the like in its more general features, it is attracted to decay, death, aggression and perversion further down its own spiral. The Biophilic is anti-neurotic, the Necrophilic stems out of emotional blockades, or negative emotions. Most humans share biophilic and necrophilic tendencies. Only few humans are more or less thoroughly or completely necrophilic; in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Fromm discusses Hitler as a respective example at great length. Yet there are also a few humans that are thoroughly or completely biophilic, as we may assume. As long as there is Being, the Biophilic will be the stronger principle than the Necrophilic, since as long there is Being, it will triumph over Nothingness. The pin-ups of Gil Elvgren are an emanation of the purely Biophilic, I would say. Gil Elvgren preferred to work with younger models at the beginning of their career. According to him, they may still carry the freshness and spontaneity that older and more experienced models lack. He valued models that were interested and enthusiastic, but said that they were “very hard to find”. The purely Biophilic and pure beauty are, indeed, hard to find, in the human swamp, in the swamp of existence. But, once they surface, they outshine the swamp. They give us the idea that we all are beautiful, biophilic, and authentic. And somewhere deeper down at least, we are. That´s why these emanations are so vital, and that is why the women of Gil Elvgren have a special place in my heart, and mind.

Whether beauty is “ontologically hard”, i.e. “out there” in the world, or just a subjective phantasma, however objective its criteria may be, is probably undecidable. That would render such speculations, in the final consequence, as mere metaphysics. That would all but close the circle, in which beauty appears as something “metaphysical” in the first place. The metaphysical is an eternal knot, or an eternal twisted loop, which relates our enigmatic subjectivity to an enigmatic objectivity, and tries to sort out the meaning of both by reflecting one in the other. The metaphysical seems to give our subjectivity objective importance and gravity, and the objective enigmatically mimicking or reflecting our subjectivity. And so does beauty.

Helmut Newton and the Beauty and the Objecthood of Women

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.

Gil Elvgren’s Pin-Up Girls And Their Photo Reference | Amusing Planet

In Memoriam Plaaastic

Coming back to Sheidlina, I had to find out that Sheidlina collaborator Plaaastic died. Her universe was more uncanny as she was suffering from horrible depression. This is very sad. I hope she will now truly be in some celestial realm. Farewell, sister 😓

One Day

One day I will be
Just a forgotten memory.
But I will be your
forgotten memory.

Don’t forget to forget

http://www.plaaastic.com/

Aliens Looking for Real Fun (Spellling, Shampoo, Sheidlina and the Antisphere)

Spellling I find to be the contemporary Queen of Pop and the greatest Queen of Pop since Shampoo! Consequently, Shampoo are barely remembered and Spellling is barely known (currently she has 1.824 followers on FB). Shampoo were perfect individuals, and individualism is what (some) people try to achieve and some collective phantasma; in the final instance, nevertheless, the individual is an antithesis to any collective and therefore disembedded. The perfect individual will be truly monadic, and the highest degree of individuality gets achieved when someone erects his empire in the highest anarchy, as a loner and a hermit, says Nietzsche. Whereas Shampoo were a fusion of punk, kitsch, girlie pop, abrasiveness, cuteness, Sex Pistols, East 17 and Gary Numan; Spellling is commonly characterised as an amalgam of afropop, R & B, darkwave, vintage electronic, howling, whispering, presence and elusiveness, something that is child-like as well is it is uncanny and haunted. Yet, by all means, the music of Spellling is perfectly pure and in no way derivative. Bhagwan, the 20th century Zarathustra, says: One who wants to transcend this obnoxious humanity will need to be so extreme that humanity will deem him/her crazy! Spellling appears highly eccentric, also (occasionally) in the way she dresses (at most occasions she is just rather casually clothed though, like I am, since we are no pretenders), in reality she is just completely sane and is the magic source and the center from which all rationality and creativity pours out. There she stands, in stasis, where everything around her revolves! Nietzsche says, (when the highest level of consciousness is reached), there shall be „something inexpressible, to which joy and truth are only feeble after-images … earth is losing its gravity, the incidents and the powers of earth become dream-like, like on a summer evening a transfiguration and glorification comes into place….“ (Schopenhauer as Educator). Yes, indeed, strange celestial realms, which are beyond that what is commonly imagined as Heaven (since they also incorporate, as a necessary by-product of totality, Hell). It is the Antisphere! In Heaven you are in a permanent communion with Christ, the Grand Unifier. However, how should the wandering mind be in an everlasting communion with anything, including the Grand Unifier?! The Antisphere explodes with colours. It is the phase space of creativity. In the Antisphere you are in a negatively curved space, on a line of flight into infinity, as you are in permanent communion with your own transgression. In the Antisphere you do not want to confirm of affirm yourself. You want to get rid o fand away from yourself. All my life I just tried to get away from myself, said Marcel Duchamp, the Holy Ghost of 20th century art. That´s the spirit of art and of (any sort of) enlightenment! In the Antisphere you are in perfect harmony with yourself, since in the Antisphere you are the source. Janis said, of all the great artists he had personally met, only Duchamp and Mondrian had been truly harmonious and uncompetetive personalities. This is the Antisphere. Spellling says she loves the figures of wizards, tricksters and jesters. Yorick, the Fool. Spellling says the essence of Spellling is about capturing the essence, the magic of every moment. As concerns the heavens, Spellling says she does not know about the afterlife, but she is interested in parallel lives. Her dad has synaesthesia. In the video to Under the Sun (set up by congenial collaborator Catalina Xavlena and in which you see the Antisphere) she dances like the most intelligent person in the world. In general, in the Antisphere the dances between signifier and the signified are beyond common understanding and beyond the limits of (post) structuralism, they become a unified whole, reality and dream become one, the phantasma becomes transgressed; it is the mind of the Grand Unifier death to false metal.

Solange, the little eccentric sister of Beyoncè, I find also charming ->

Sheidlina is also from the Antisphere. She once said, after doing this stuff for years, she has come to recognise that coolness like that will only ever be something for a tiny minority to be grasped (haha, very cool!).

Estoy muy conmovido

Drei große Fragen des Menschen: Was soll ich tun? Was kann ich machen? Wo gehe ich hin? Will ich also mit Raja in die Monet-Ausstellung in der Albertina. Wir sind spät dran, da sie in ein paar Tagen ausläuft, wollen also unter Woche zu Mittag, in Erwartung, dass es dann vergleichsweise ruhig ist, dort hin. Vierte große Frage des Menschen: Was muss ich sehen? Eine unglaublich lange Schlange vor der Albertina, an Leuten, die weit über die gewaltige, allmächtige Treppe hinausreicht, bis hinter den Eingang zum Filmmuseum! Ich blieb dort eine Weile wie angewurzelt stehen, weil ich es kaum glauben konnte und mich vergewissern wollte, dass es sich dabei um keine optische Täuschung oder Fata Morgana handelt – aber es war dem tatsächlich so: die Schlange war ganz real. Und weg die Puste; also sind wir stattdessen in den Tirolerhof gegangen. Immer wieder die Menschheit! Stehen sie also in einer langen Schlange, wie die Blöden, nur damit sie sich im ebenfalls völlig überfüllten Museum beinahe über den Haufen laufen und sich in die Kunst ja nicht einmal im gewöhnlichen Maßstab, also dass man im Museum an den Bildern eher gemütlich vorbeiläuft, vertiefen und diese genießen können; und das in einer schneidenden, unangenehmen Kälte – und wenn dann einer wie van Gogh oder Nietzsche oder ich daherkommt, die also was machen von einer strahlenden, extrem auffälligen Schönheit und Intelligenz, dann kann man es ihnen täglich aufs Aug kleben, kostenlos und unschuldig, und es interessiert sie nicht und sie beachten es kaum! Ich weiß jetzt nicht, wie das bei Monet war, womöglich ähnlich. Was soll man sich für einen Reim darauf machen – es geht nicht, denn es reimt sich nicht. Das Dasein reimt sich halt in etlichen Aspekten nicht, ist eben dort und da nicht lyrisch oder episch, sondern prosaisch. Was macht man aber in einem solchen Fall? Versuchen, ihn anders zu betrachten! Sie stehen also Schlange, in schneidender Kälte, vielfach Touristen, zu den Feiertagen um den Jahreswechsel. Sie können oder wollen dort nicht weg, nicht ausbrechen – Herdenverhalten (oder so). Eigenartig auch immer, wie vor dem Würstelstand bei der Oper und Albertina stets eine Schlange von Menschen steht, damit sie eine ganz gewöhnliche Bosna bekommen, obwohl das ja an jeder Straßenecke möglich ist (und zwar genauso möglich). Da stehen sie also, bei Wind und Wetter, in einer langen Schlange vor einem Würstelstand und vor einer Kunstausstellung. Und wenn einer wie van Gogh oder Nietzsche oder — aber naja. – Wie bleibt womöglich der Verstand stehen, schmilzt aber das Herz jetzt, wenn ich mir vergegenwärtige, was sie alles auf sich nehmen: eine Stunde oder mehr in der scheidenden Kälte stehen um dann in einem völlig überlaufenen Museum den Monet zu sehen. All das nur, um den Monet zu sehen! Und meine heißen Tränen fließen, zumindest innerlich. Wie müssen die Tränen des Monet fließen, wenn er das sehen könnte? Was sie alles auf sich nehmen, nur um seine Bilder zu sehen! Während Raja und ich in diesem Zusammenhang nichts auf uns genommen haben, haben sie für die Kunst was auf sich genommen! Während Raja und ich in diesem Zusammenhang für die Kunst nicht gelitten haben, haben sie für die Kunst gelitten!  Wie rührend die Dinge dann auch immer wieder liegen auf diesem Planeten! Wie rührend Loving Vincent, der von allen geliebt wird, jetzt. Und Nietzsche weinte, sowieso. Der Mensch hätte gerne Antworten auf seine Fragen und der Yorick mag sich sicher fragen, was für eine Bedeutung die Kunst, die Philosophie, der Geist, das Ideelle, das was er macht, eigentlich hat, angesichts dieser Doppelperspektive, wo die Menschen und die Akademiker, die den Vincent und den Friedrich lieben und sich in langen Schlangen um sie anstellen, den nächsten unbekannten Friedrich Vincent wieder genauso ignorieren. Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Ist das, was man da macht, eigentlich von kaum einer Bedeutung, oder ist es von einer sehr großen Bedeutung? Spielt es kaum eine Rolle in der Welt, oder eine recht große Rolle in der Welt? Kann man die Welt eigentlich verändern, oder kann man es nicht? Allerdings, das kann sich nicht nur der nach seinem Tod gewaltige, allmächtige Künstler-Philosoph fragen, sondern auch Rockefeller, der Kaiser von China oder Napoleon; oder der Christus oder der Buddha oder der Marx, wie es um die (positiven) Effekte ihrer Wirksamkeit überhaupt bestellt sein kann, in einer Welt wie dieser. Allerdings lässt sich diese Art von Rätsel in meine Sicht vom Chaosmos ja ohne Weiteres integrieren, und gestern Nacht ist mir auch eine blendende Formulierung ins Gehirn geschossen, warum, leider nur habe ich sie vergessen; aber egal: denn das alles IST eben der sich prozessierende Chaosmos, und wenn man will, kann man sich, als keine so schwierige Übung, ja auch selber was dazu ausdenken. Einerseits gefällt es den Menschen immer wieder nicht so, wenn etwas daherkommt, dass sie an Intelligenz und guten Eigenschaften deutlich überschreitet, oder sie haben zumindest oft gemischte Gefühle deswegen; andererseits ist es aber ganz real, dass der Mensch nach etwas strebt und etwas verehrt, Ziele und Inhalte die nobler sind als er. Es gibt ja auch keine größere und authentische und dauerhaftere Verehrung, die die Menschen – und zwar die Menschen ganz allgemein – dem entgegenbringen, das große Noblesse hat, und spirituelle Wahrheit. Noblesse und spirituelle Wahrheit und Bedeutung zu erlangen, bedeutet in der Regel, dass man durch was hindurchgegangen ist, gelitten hat, in der Wüste war, um das Gegebene zu überschreiten und neue Formen und Inhalte zu werfen, so wie es Monet getan hat. Der Monetartige Mensch war in der Wüste, hat sich selbst geprüft und hat gelitten, und jetzt leiden die Menschen für ihn draußen in der Schlange und in der Kälte, nur um ihn zu sehen. Ich bin sehr bewegt und gerührt! Und ein wenig beschämt, außerdem. Die Massen vor der Albertina von vorvorgestern haben für die Kunst gelitten und sie sind wahrhaft durch etwas hindurchgegangen, während die Künstler Raja und ich in dem Zusammenhang für Monet nicht gelitten haben und nicht hindurchgegangen sind. Ja scheiß einer die Wand an.

Remembering Lucrezia Buti, Marie Fel, and Company

Years ago, when I saw Quentin de la Tour`s portrait of Marie Fel (an opera singer of the 18th century – born Oct. 24, 1713, transformed Feb. 2, 1794) it moved me. A beautiful, lively, a bit secretive and mysterious face, a suggestive and eloquent physiognomy, staring at you, it has a high degree of presence and immediacy – but is long dead! Does this make me melancholic? Yes! The contours are soft, it seems like an emanation from an obscure, nebulous, eternal, undifferentiated background; well: a momentous epiphany of (distinguished) man out of the silence of eternity, into which it must pass again after some instants in time – or maybe still is there, behind the veil. Ahh, the human condition! Does this make me melancholic? Yes! Thoughful, to say the least. So it goes. Marie Fel´s heart will go on somewhere in mine and I have her on my mind.

As I wanted to write the note about Childishness in Art I borrowed a book from the library (Kinder in der Kunst) (unfortunately I did not find much else about that valuable subject). In that book I also saw Filippo Lippi´s Madonna with Child and Two Angels (1465), which moved me as well. The Madonna is supposed to have been a nun named Lucrezia Buti, who had been turned into a monastery together with her sister Spinetta by her brother Antonio. She fell in love with Filippo and fled from the monastery, causing a scandal, later giving birth to two children, Fillipino and Alessandra. Because of the couple´s courage and the sincerity of their love they later found pardon by clerical authorities. In the heavy book about Filippo´s paintings there wasn´t much information about Lucrezia, unfortunately. Maybe I can get a better book about her and the story of her life. That would interest me. At any rate I like Lucrezia´s idiosyncratic beauty. Because of this also she seems immediately present.

In Kinder in der Kunst there is also the fresco Leucothea and Dionysos, which was painted in the year 20 A.D. in a villa in Rome. What a gracious lady! And so you may ask yourself: How did the ancient Romans look like? How did Messalina look like? Were they graceful and, occasionally, vulgar as well, like people in our times? A while ago I read Quo vadis? by Sienkiewicz. The depiction of the massacres of Nero against the Christians are colourful, although I cannot actually tell how exactly. It is a horrible book as concerns the (exaggerated) portrayal of Nero´s holocaust-like atrocities, but the depiction of the Christian´s strong and transcendent faith and of their nice (actually, a bit faded) personalities had an impression on me. A main character of Quo vadis? is Petronius Arbiter, author of the Satyricon, the product of a very free and independent mind – Nietzsche loved it, I do it as well. Someone like the Arbiter occurs very rarely among humans. And hence it is alleged in Quo vadis? that Petronius was the only person in the culturally most high standing Rome who actually understood what poetry is about (whereas the others all took it as an extension of their ego or an instrument to flatter the emperor or so). When Petronius was sentenced to death by suicide by Nero he would say that the loss of life is not actually something to be sorry about: as things in this world are beautiful, but men are, in their majority, so wicked that an escape from them into the void is not regrettable. Long ago I was very impressed by Robert Graves´ I, Claudius, a historical novel that brings ancient Rome triumphantly to life. Graves was massively intelligent and had a stupendous output. I also read his White Goddess – although the specific anima of the White Goddess has not been a direct muse for myself, I like Graves´concept of analeptic thought: throwing one´s mind into the past to receive impressions. Indeed, it is good to have everything on the monitor, yes.

In the book there was also a portrait of young Mozart by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, a painter who painted in the style of rococo. In the book it was said that while Greuze enjoyed great success in his earlier days, he increasingly came to be seen as outdated, could not live from his sales anymore and had to become a teacher and finally died in great poverty. That moved me a lot and I got me a book about Greuze (since I also like the name „Greuze“). To be correct, Greuze´s influence declined in later years, but not substantially and he died in poverty mainly because of mismanagement and embezzlement by his wife. When I look at this Portrait of a Young Lady I wonder about her, like I wonder about Marie and Lucrezia. There is mysterious life in this face, evanescent but still very present and stronger than decay. What would the young lady have to tell? – Greuze was a painter of sentiment. His paintings usually carried a message respectively tought a lesson in moral. He lived in an age of sentiment, where a spirit of moral responsibility and enabling a good, decent life for everyone was in the air (and stood in relation to the bourgeoisie as a (proto-) revolutionary class – the cult of sentimentality could, in a Foucaultian sense, be understood as a formation of identity and self-awareness by internalising the moral codex of the state). Greuze´s most distinguished pupil was Constance Mayer, who would later commit suicide. Unfortunately I could not find much about her neither in the library nor on the internet. (Also Quentin de la Tour was associated with a female painter, Rosalba Carriera, as Rosalba made pastel-coloured painting popular again in Paris at his time. So I got me a book with Rosalba´s paintings. But I have to say that I hardly find in this book such glimpses of eternity as you have it in the portrait of Marie Fel et al. Indeed, that is rare in the domain of human physiognomy respectively art anyway.) The abbé de La Porte said: „I am sure that Moniseur Greuze is a man attentive to all that surrounds him: he is an observer who keeps nature constantly in view, and knows how to capture it in its most interesting aspects… What nobility!“

As you see, these (mostly ordinary) folks have long since passed and left no other trace in history, but they´re on my mind. Their presence is, actually, heavy. You see, I am not very talkative and I feel profoundly isolated from society (actually: from humanity), even from the high IQ societies, since these structures never seem to be resemblant to me, yet actually/but on the other hand I am so attached to and affected by the world that for instance when I look at the tree in front of me, it seems to immediately come near, even overrun me. The most common feeling I have (or had, especially when I wrote the Book of Strange and Unproductive Thinking) is that I am drawn, absorbed into the universe, and stick on it (a feeling that was, when I wrote the Book of Strange and Unproductive Thinking, quite painful as I felt literally enchained and grown together with the universe/the totality of being and unable to detach myself from the pain and the impositions existence includes). And so, although I am quite alone I am always surrounded by people, maybe even grown together with them, and Marie Fel and company are an expression of that. They reach into the depths of myself. When I look up, Lucrezia Buti may sit on the bench next to me. I live in a heavily populated world. Where does my self end and that of other begin? And ghosts are, in this respect, real (and more human than human).

Because of this, I am an unemployed social reject. When I was waiting for my adivisor in an institution for unemployed people recently I asked myself: When I somehow say that: after my death I am still a part of the flow/the continuum of life or so (I cannot remember the exact wording): is this a rational allegation, an emotional one, or a spiritual one? This is actually not easy to distinguish and it is correct in all those dimensions. I´ve been thinking for a while how rational, spitirual, emotional etc. sentences can be seperated, i.e. in the Wittgenstein manner. But maybe there´s some Quine to the whole problem who said that the analytical and the synthetical are not so easily to be seperated (if I remember correctly). The thing is, if your attachment to the living world/creature and capacity to get immersed in it is profound and not as superficial as in the case of ordinary man, respectively if you´re the overman, such distinctions are superfluous, indeed. But what it means among man is to be philosophised upon.

Beauty in colours

This is the coolest face I´ve seen in a while (within a cool mix of colours)

These are the coolest hands I´ve seen in a while (within a cool mix of colours)

This is the coolest butterfly on face I´ve seen in a while (within a cool mix of colours)

This is the coolest scenery I´ve seen in a while (within a cool mix of colours)

The sentient, creative inner child rejoices upon them impressions (and this is the cutest redhead I´ve seen in a while)

(Although I also dig that one)

 

Update about Jennifer/Ryonen

Relating to the post below, I want to state that I find idiosyncratic beauty the highest form of beauty. Kinda manufactured beauty of popular models does not particularly attract me, since it usually lacks individuality. Jennifer Sullins/Ryonen Cava I find one of the most interesting aesthetic phenomena on Earth. She embodies one of the highest idiosyncratic beauties. Her beauty comes in an unexpected way, I have not thought about her specific beauty before, it did not approach me in my mind. What can you ever desire more?

Jennifer Sullins | Anthony Maule | CR Fashion Book #1, F/W 2012/2013 | ‚The White Mughal‘

www.reneeruin.com: Who’s that Girl? – Ryonen

„CARMEN“ comic Ryonen (Jennifer Sullins) on Behance

Alice Séthe

Den stärksten Eindruck in der Pointillismusausstellung hat auf mich van Ryesselberghes „Porträt der Alice Séthe“ gemacht.

Vielleicht schau ich extra deswegen noch ein zweites Mal da hin. Andererseits sehe ich eh dauernd was von enormer ästhetischer Strahlkraft und Perfektion, die Welt ist diesbezüglich ja auch reichhaltig; warum an meinen Mitmenschen, inklusive der Kulturbeflissenen, das alles einfach immer nur so vorbeizieht, weiß ich auch nicht; ist mir aber auch wurscht, was die machen.

(Die Person mit der interessanten Physiognomie ist Jennifer Sullins/Ryonen Cava)

Update about Something Perfect

Philip Hautmann

August 2 at 12:46pm ·

 I swear, this is one of the most perfect things I have ever seen.

ballerina

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Philip Hautmann
Philip HautmannThe innocent girl child! The ballerina! Who ties herself to art (at a young age)! Who defeats gravity! The self confident countenance, assertive to openness, to what lies ahead! The colours of dress! The whiteness of the fan! From above right, the light (resolving the scene into the ethereal)! The wooden Sinnloszaun! And, ahhhh, the manhole cover, as an additional element, making reality more dense, interesting, senselessly value added, full of information, etc. <3
UPDATE: One of the most perfect things I have ever seen, and, like practically always, 4 Likes on Facebook. HAHAHAHAHAHA! People are so „weird“ <3 Let´s dance
dancer1 dancinggirl ballett