Author Archives: corporealfemme

tracey emin

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“Art is an extended act away from the being, art is something else. Not everything can be art, and just because you’re an artist doesn’t mean everything you touch is art. You have to decide and know what is art, and you have  to be separate from yourself.” -Tracey Emin

When I first came across the art of Tracey Emin, I wasn´t so sure how to feel about the way she sells herself/her art. She seemed to be so commercially inclined and I sort of judged her work, immediately questioning the integrity of her process and her pieces. The more I investigate her art, the more I fall in love with it.  It´s not only the confessional quality her works possess that resonates with me, it´s just the honesty, that raw, ugly honesty that most are so afraid to show.

“Emin exposes herself, her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in an incredibly direct manner. Often tragic and frequently humorous, it is as if by telling her story and weaving it into the fiction of her art she somehow transforms it.” read more about Emin here.

Her website.

I’ve Got It All, 2000

Tracey Emin is almost always portrayed as a Diana-esque femme tragique. It’s rare to get a glimpse of the happy, successful, confident person she’s become. I’ve Got It All is a transient crowning glory: a shameless, two-fingers up to her critics. Emin’s triumphed over all, and has money up the whazoo to boot!

Installation including 14 paintings, 78 drawings, 5 body prints, various painted and personal items, furniture, CDs, newspapers, magazines, kitchen and food supplies. 1996

In 1974, Joseph Beuys did a performance called I Love America, and America Loves Me where he lived in a gallery with a wild coyote for seven days as a symbolic act of reconciliation with nature. In 1996, Tracey Emin lived in a locked room in a gallery for fourteen days, with nothing but a lot of empty canvases and art materials, in an attempt to reconcile herself with paintings. Viewed through a series of wide-angle lenses embedded in the walls, Emin could be watched, stark naked, shaking off her painting demons. Starting by making images like the artists she really admired (i.e. Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Yves Klein), Emin’s two-week art-therapy session resulted in a massive outpouring of autobiographical images, and the discovery of a style all her own. The room was extracted in its entirety, and now exists as an installation work.

Three above from Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made

After My Abortion XII (1990) watercolour on paper, 10 x 8 in (25.5 x 20.4 cm)My bed, 1998

A consummate storyteller, Tracey Emin engages the viewer with her candid exploration of universal emotions. Well-known for her confessional art, Tracey Emin reveals intimate details from her life to engage the viewer with her expressions of universal emotions. Her ability to integrate her work and personal life enables Emin to establish an intimacy with the viewer.

Tracey shows us her own bed, in all its embarrassing glory. Empty booze bottles, fag butts, stained sheets, worn panties: the bloody aftermath of a nervous breakdown. By presenting her bed as art, Tracey Emin shares her most personal space, revealing she’s as insecure and imperfect as the rest of the world.

admonitions to a special person by anne sexton

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Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you’ll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Watch out for games, the actor’s part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won’t be heard
and none of your running will end.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can’t be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Special person,
if I were you I’d pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you’ll root
and the real green thing will come.

Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon.

“lost girls” by alan moore, illustrated by melinda gebbie

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“When I first started writing comics for adults, I found myself forever needing to explain that, no, I wasn’t writing those kind of adult stories.

The boundary between pornography and erotica is an ambiguous one, and it changes depending on where you’re standing. For some, perhaps, it’s a matter of whatever turns you on (my erotica, your pornography), for some the distinction occurs in class (i.e. erotica is pornography for rich people). Perhaps it’s also something to do with the means of distribution – internet pornography is unquestionably porn, while an Edwardian publication, on creamy paper, bought by connoisseurs, part works bound into expensive volumes, must be erotica.

Alan Moore knows his words.”

Read the rest of this review by Neil Gaiman here

Download Lost Girls here

lyrics by alan moore

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(performed by David J, lyrics by Alan Moore)

They say that there’s a broken light for every heart on Broadway.
They say that life’s a game, then they take the board away.
They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story
Then leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret…

In no-longer-pretty cities there are fingers in kitties.
There are warrants, forms, and chitties and a jackboot on the stair.
Sex and death and human grime, in monochrome for one thin dime,
But at least the trains all run on time but they don’t go anywhere.
Facing their Responsibilities either on their backs or on their knees
There are ladies who just simply freeze and dare not turn away
And the widows who refuse to cry will be dressed in garter and bow-tie
And be taught to kick their legs up high in this vicious cabaret.

At last! The 1998 Show!
The ballet on the burning stage.
The documentary see
Upon the fractured screen
The dreadful poem scrawled upon the crumpled page…

There’s a policeman with an honest soul that has seen whose head is on the pole
And he grunts and fills his briar bowl with a feeling of unease.
But he briskly frisks the torn remains for a fingerprint or crimson stains
And endeavours to ignore the chins that he walks in to his knees.
while his master in the dark nearby inspects the hands, with a brutal eye,
That have never brushed a lover’s thigh but have squeezed a nation’s threat.
But he hungers in his secret dreams for the harsh embrace of cruel machines
But his lover is not what she seems and she will not leave a note.

At last! The 1998 Show!
The Situation Tragedy
Grand Opera slick with soap
Cliffhangers with no hope
The water-colour in the flooded gallery…

There’s a girl who’ll push but not shove and is desperate for her father’s love
She believes the hand beneath the glove maybe one she needs to hold.
Though she doubts her hosts moralities she decides she is more at ease
In the Land Of Doing What You Please than outside in the cold.
But the backdrop’s peel and the sets give way and the cast gets eaten by the play
There’s a murderer at the Matinee, there are dead men in the aisles
And the patrons and actors too are uncertain if the show is through
And with side-long looks await their cue but the frozen mask just smiles.

At last! The 1998 Show!
The torch-song no one ever sings
The curfew chorus line
The comedy divine
The bulging eyes of puppets strangled by their strings

There’s thrills and chills and girls galore, sing-songs and surprises
There’s something hear for everyone (reserve your seat today)
There’s mischief and malarkies but no queers or yids or darkies
Within this bastard’s carnival, this vicious cabaret.

Read more about Alan Moore on record here

moon and flying snow

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Beautiful fight scene between Moon (Zhang Ziyi) and Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) in the yellow forest from the extended version of the movie “Hero”

Hero was first released in China on October 24, 2002. At that time, it was the most expensive project and the highest-grossing motion picture in Chinese film history.

drawings by chaos magician austin osman spare

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“London has harboured many curious characters, but few more curious than the artist and visionary Austin Osman Spare (1886–1956). A controversial enfant terrible of the Edwardian art world, the young Spare was hailed as a genius and a new Aubrey Beardsley, while George Bernard Shaw reportedly said, “Spare’s medicine is too strong for the average man”.

But Spare was never made for worldly success and he went underground, falling out of the gallery system to live in poverty and obscurity south of the river. Absorbed in occultism and sorcery, voyaging into inner dimensions and surrounding himself with cats and familiar spirits, he continued to produce extraordinary art while developing a magical philosophy of pleasure, obsession, and the subjective nature of reality.”

I particularly adore his automatic drawings and his drawings of robust, strong women. He was certainly a figure drawing master.

His writings about magic was groundbreaking. Read his Book of Pleasure here.

His writing on automatic drawing here.

sappho

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Sappho – Charles-August Mengin
Oil on canvas, 1877

THE MUSES

Hither now, O Muses, leaving the golden
House of God unseen in the azure spaces,
Come and breathe on bosom and brow and kindle
Song like the sunglow;

Come and lift my shaken soul to the sacred
Shadow cast by Helicon’s rustling forests;
Sweep on wings of flame from the middle ether,
Seize and uplift me;

Thrill my heart that throbs with unwonted fervor,
Chasten mouth and throat with immortal kisses,
Till I yield on maddening heights the very
Breath of my body.

~ from The Poems of Sappho: An Interpretative Rendition into English, translated by John Myers O’Hara, 1870-1944.

More about her life and poetry : The Tenth Muse

3. affectivity

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on why we often desire what makes us miserable (to where we often come to regret the good old days of arranged marriages) and on why women don’t say what they think.

13. Within the terrible community, emotional education is based on systematic humiliation, and the pulverization of its members’ self-esteem. No one must be able to believe themselves to be a carrier of that kind of affectivity which would have the right to a place inside the community.The hegemonic type of affectivity inside the terrible community corresponds, paradoxically, to what is seen outside of it as the most backwards form. The tribe, the village, the clan, the gang, the army, the family; these are the human formations universally acknowledged as being the most cruel and the least gratifying, and yet in spite of all they persist within the terrible communities. And in them, women must take on a kind of virility that even males disclaim now in biopolitical democracies, all the while seeing themselves as women whose femininity has lost out to the masculine fantasy dominant at the very heart of the terrible community: the fantasy of plastic “sexy” woman (in the image of the Young-Girl, that carnal envelope) ready for use and consumption by genital sexuality.

14. In the terrible communities, women, because they cannot actually become men, must become like men, while remaining furiously heterosexual and prisoners of the most worn-out stereotypes. If nobody has the right, in the terrible community, to say the truth about human relations, that’s doubly true for women: any woman that undertakes parrhesia within the terrible community will be immediately classed as just some hysteric.

from Tiqqun 2: Theses on the terrible community.

the work of nan goldin

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As a teenager in Boston in the 1960s, then in New York starting in the 1970s, Nan Goldin has taken intensely personal, spontaneous, sexual, and transgressive photographs of her family, friends, and lovers. In 1979 she presented her first slideshow in a New York nightclub, and her richly colored, snapshotlike photographs were soon heralded as a groundbreaking contribution to fine art photography. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency—the name she gave her ever-evolving show—eventually grew into a forty-five-minute multimedia presentation of more than 900 photographs, accompanied by a musical soundtrack.

yes yes by charles bukowski

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when God created love he didn’t help most
when God created dogs He didn’t help dogs
when God created plants that was average
when God created hate we had a standard utility
when God created me He created me
when God created the monkey He was asleep
when He created the giraffe He was drunk
when He created narcotics He was high
and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed
He knew what He was doing
He was drunk and He was high
and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes
but when He created you lying in bed
He came all over His Blessed Universe.

 

 

 

robert desnos – i have dreamed of you so much

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I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.
Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make
your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my
chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.
For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many
days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who
counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and
face of some passerby.

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much
with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom
among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow the
moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

man ray – l’étoile de mer

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Based on the poetry of Robert Desnos

Almost all of the scenes in this film are shot either off a mirror like the final shot, or through diffused and textured glass.

Les dents des femmes sont des objets si charmants… (Women’s teeth are such charming objects…)

… qu’ on ne devrait les voir qu’ en rêve ou à l’instant de l’amour. (… that one ought to see them only in a dream or in the instant of love.)

Si belle! Cybèle? (So beautiful! Cybèle?)

Nous sommes à jamais perdus dans le désert de l’éternèbre. (We are forever lost in the desert of eternal darkness.)

Qu’elle est belle (How beautiful she is)

“Après tout” (“After all”)

Si les fleurs étaient en verre (If the flowers were in glass)

Belle, belle comme une fleur de verre (Beautiful, beautiful like a flower of glass)
Belle comme une fleur de chair (Beautiful like a flower of flesh)
Il faut battre les morts quand ils sont froids. (One must beat the dead while they are cold.)

Les murs de la Santé (The walls of the Santé)
Et si tu trouves sur cette terre une femme à l’amour sincère… (And if you find on this earth a woman of sincere love…)
Belle comme une fleur de feu (Beautiful like a flower of fire)
Le soleil, un pied à l’étrier, niche un rossignol dans un voile de crêpe. (The sun, one foot in the stirrup, nestles a nightingale in a veil of crepe.)

Vous ne rêvez pas (You are not dreaming)

Qu’elle était belle (How beautiful she was)
Qu’elle est belle (How beautiful she is)

chadwick tyler – “something she didn’t know was there”

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I just love the ´dirty´work of Chadwick Tyler. These photos were part of his exhibition ´Tiberius´, 2009.

“Every project I do revolves around the model, “the girl.” For me, to work with a model is to find a connection, to develop a mode of communication & to create a relationship, in order to draw what is within her out to the surface. My job is to enable a model to feel comfortable being vulnerable in a way that shows up on camera. Documenting the range of a girl’s personality that emerges is everything to me; especially when it’s something she didn’t know was there.” – Chadwick Tyler

divine madness: can creativity kill you?

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Superstar at home NYC, 1968 by Diane Arbus

During Diane Arbus’s funeral, the photographer Richard Avedon turned to a friend and whispered, ”Oh, I wish I could be an artist like Diane.” The friend, Frederick Eberstadt, answered, ”Oh, no, you don’t.” Their brief exchange – as recounted in Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Arbus – raises the charged questions surrounding the tormented, even self-destructive, creative artist. Chief among them is where reality ends and mythology begins.

Arbus personified the artist whose inner turmoil – depression, dislocation and a taste for risk bordering on a death wish – fueled her creations, those moving and disturbing photographs of drag queens and hermaphrodites, celebrities and Siamese twins. But Arbus was also a woman defeated by depressions so debilitating she often could not work and, ultimately, chose not to live. Finally, Arbus represented an artist who gained more fame, who was indeed romanticized, more for living on the edge than for the artistry she brought back from that emotional frontier.

It is no wonder, then, that Arbus – that the entire issue of the ”mad artist,” as the awful cliche has it -should both attract and repel, as it has for literally thousands of years. Aristotle spoke of ”divine madness,” Renaissance scholar Marsilio Ficino of the ”Saturnine temperament.” The playwright August Strindberg declared that few people were ”lucky enough to be capable of madness,” and the poet John Berryman opined, ”The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not nearly kill him.”

Read more of Samuel G Freedman´s text here