Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

Guess who’s going to watch Moonrise Kingdom this afternoon ?

I originally planned to watch it two weeks ago but I had exams in between, so …

Your body will haunt mine (On Egon Schiele)

panchodelaluna:

(for Mark Macapagal and Marin Jabin, fellow admirers of Egon Schiele)

(Self-Portrait, 1911 Egon Schiele (Austrian, 1890–1918))

Despite the lamentable shortness of his life, Egon Schiele achieved a personal artistic style which drew much controversy and praise around him and irritated the fashionably rigid academic conventions of art schools of his time; he even spent a short time in prison on the charge of “immorality,” convicted of creating “pornographic drawings.” If the state is left to manage art, we will all be condemned to live in the dark ages. Just imagine the hypocrisy, a nude portrait reduced to pornography! Eroticism and pornography are terms too problematic for the state. It cannot distinguish which is which so it judges by the term it only knows: force. But today nobody complains about the ubiquitous advertisements more degrading, more psychologically pernicious, more pornographic in essence that assault our senses everyday. Because our present culture has, to its detriment, mingled advertisement with art. The dividing line is almost vanished. The visible, vibrant (city) art scene today (the thing you see and read in the “culture and lifestyle” section in the newspapers) is exclusive, extremely parochial, only admits those art and artists that obediently conform to Fashion and trends. Viva Post-modernism!

But never let the state get in the way of art. In prison, Schiele produced striking paintings depicting the experience of being locked in a cell. And that’s how he paints, like someone locked in a cell! Is not the human body a sort of prison, no? A prison of flesh and bones in which we’re all condemned to live for the rest of our life. In front of one of his portraits one becomes conscious of the sentient body; how the body feels, how it succumbs to all sorts of sensations, pain, bliss, sex, desire, terror… To look at it as a pornographic image is to undervalue not only Schiele’s imagination but the depth of his humanly feelings- which, without irony, we all, too possess.

The controversy or the alleged pornography of his art is referred to the artist’s choice of models, the aggressiveness and the reality of presentation. Young girls and couples posed, bare before the artist’s and spectator’s eyes. Schiele believed in the beauty of the human body, physical beauty, but didn’t idealize it as the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance artists had. Between the duality of pleasure and pain, Schiele’s art has more affinity with pain. To perceive beauty is to affirm our awareness of suffering or pain. The experience of beauty is also the recognition of the existence of pain. Schiele has placed this perspective in the human body.

He saw in the physicality of love-making (or eroticism) the vulnerability of the human body. The acute sensitivity of the human body to pleasure, and to pain which, for Schiele, defines principally mankind. This intimate acquaintance with pain finds voice in a poem of the feminist poet Adrienne Rich:

“I put my hand on your thigh
to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine,
we stayed that way, suffering together
in our bodies, as if all suffering
were physical…”

As if all suffering were physical. This corporeal awareness is the core of Schiele’s art.

Pornography eradicates the body’s susceptibility to pain through false presentation of pleasure. It presents bodies as cold, distant, austere objects decorated with violence, empty of love or ornamented with false love, directly appeals to the immediate pleasure of uncomprehending and consuming mind- touches upon the basest appetites in human nature. Pornography is oblivious to the pain of the body. Thus, the exact opposite of Schiele’s art. To miss this fundamental distinction is a failure of seeing.

Art historians often refer to Freud’s interpretation of unfulfilled sexuality. But reference to this theory is facile and explains only partially the limitation of sex of which Schiele has attempted to go beyond in his art. Most figures erotically play, teasing, exposing, open to a kind of violence. But it is this openness, this carnal invitation that begs for knowing- a sympathetic human contact. This openness is not unfulfilled, rather it awaits to be filled by that contact. The erotic serves as a door for the intimate.

Picasso’s erotic images in Suite Vollard are caught in the struggle between longing and lust. And the struggle is never resolved. Schiele’s are caught in the artist’s personal longing presented in the reflection of lust.

Sex satisfies a need, a hunger, or it serves as a release of the animal instinct, yet it also tries to reach the core of the body’s essence: the vulnerability, the incompleteness which is transcended in the nature of making love, by a couple in love.

Love-making is the gradual accommodation of two bodies to each other; their needs, their longings, their desires and fears being shared. Through and by love does sex cease to be entirely physical and becomes immaterial, like a form of understanding, like a secret shared in a whisper, like solitude. Thus the expression “make-love” is just a more romantic word for sharing. The dark side of sexuality is when a calculated act of one’s will is imposed over the other: the violence.

The traditional European nude has epitomized this violence. The nude as objet du désir is meant to arouse the (male) spectator’s sexuality. This tradition of the nude as a feeder of appetite goes on to this day through the power of corporate advertising, photography, television and the internet. The human body unloved is processed as an object to be possessed, surveyed, bought.

Schiele’s striking style: the use of agitated lines, the deformed bodies with their angular sharpness and the strict use of limited shades- confronts the dogmatic representation of the nude. While the latter is depicted as ornamentation like a furniture one possess, Schiele liberates the nude by depicting the human body as a compressed space of interacting tensions of life: personal, political, historical all merging. No longer is the spectator flattered by the nude as in the traditional form, Schiele’s is a mirror of a state of mind.

Often Schiele’s figures are punctuated with a sharpness similar to fear. An instinctive fear of an animal when hunted. In the face of universal anxiety (the looming devastation of the First World War) Schiele’s figures are helpless animals; thus the distortion, the nakedness, the emaciation, the solitude of couples, as if all suffering were physical. These were times when Schiele was confronted by violent thoughts: love as unseizable, comfort impossible. His brief life (Schiele died at the of age 28) lived amidst the turmoil of a dissolving empire (Austro-Hungarian), the demoralization by the first global war and the attendant revolutions in Europe, the pervading theories of Freud and Lenin which accepted acts of violence, and a series of incidents which shook the entire consciousness of the continent had a devastating consequence on the individual. The human body, in Schiele’s works, is an expression of history.

When I say Schiele paints like someone locked in a cell, I say it not only in metaphorical terms but also ontologically. When he paints he enters into the other’s body only to enter his own. He searches and finds what he already knows: the transience of pleasure and the enduring pain. He was fascinated by the human body for its capacity to carry and endure the weight of consciousness; of its receptiveness to objects, to events and above all, to human contact. Most of the figures are drawn with eyes looking at the spectator, as if saying: “Look at me, touch me, complete me.” But we, the spectators, are not invited as voyeurs, nor as surgeons, but something more personal, more attached, a sort of companion. He wants us to enter the image/the body to search beyond the flesh and bones of anatomy a contact, not strange but familiar. A human contact that will allow us to reach the pain of the other’s body, and perhaps by looking with attention we will perceive and sense it in our own. And in this act of generosity the possibility of sharing pain might lead to more than the experience of fleeting pleasure. A sense of companionship that is generated by sharing and understanding.

Listen again to the poet Adrienne Rich:

“Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine…
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting for years for you
… whatever happens, this is.”

- Pancho Dela Luna

(via egonschiele)