“A well drawn figure penetrates you of a completely foreign pleasure to the subject. Voluptuous (Volaptuous) or terrible, this figure owes its charm only to 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, Baudelaire proposes a formal vision to the extreme of it, where the subject-matter is practically disappearing behind the abstract lines. Still, the two subjects given as examples are significant, On one hand, the body of an ecorché, skinned body, fascinating and repulsive 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 components of the erotic pleasure, whether confessed or not. If one tries to apply this remark to the bodies of Bellmer one remains indicided. 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”. But, we know, and what happened here during the Bellmer exhibit is the best proof, that those pretty things, those landscapes-body are above all the bodies which cannot leave us indifferent. Nevertheless, the decomposition of the visual pleasure proposed by Baudelaire summarizes perfectly the ambiguity of Bellmer’s work. Between the virtuosity, the perfection of a body idealized and the violence related to the penetration of this body, one is, if I dare say, in front of entré multiple. Libertine and possibly a torturer, but of a torturer equipped with an extremely refined aesthetic education. Delicate balance, and of which the most original part, the specificity of the German artist remains that of the voyage inside the body. One knows it, since always, naked and smooth, the female body was promise of aesthetic and sensual pleasures. The eye of the spectator was pulled about between artistic contemplation and the erotic pleasure. With these bodies, the skin and the surface of the painting merged, the glance slipped as a scopique caress, but never did penetrate within. $$(Félix Trutat Rest and desire, 1845) The delights of the skin are not those of the flesh and if the perception often dreames to reach under the surface, it was generally doomed to remain at out of bounds of the desired object. An immaculate object, always smooth like the mirror, without stain, without touch, without hands… ”… Object, for which one can borrow the famous expression that Roland Barthes employs for Dutch still lives by saying that they have a shininess which is used for “to lubricate man’s glance”. Seemingly, Bellmer succeed in reversing this tendency and being introduced under the skin. The artist proposes an anatomist scrutiny, a radiography of the bodies of which the envelope is not impervious any more and where the eye, which usually slips on the curves or palpates the forms, explores the most intimate interior. In its desire to explore what will remain forever hidden, the hand of the draughtsman becomes a tool, which goes under the successive layers and reveals the last unknown factors of human architecture. The hand? Not really. One could believe it but listen rather to the painter. “I want to see with the hand”, is his posted project and of which the ambition betrays also the limits. Actually, it is not a question of a desire of an unlimited tactility but rather of a devouring scopique impulse, which directs the erotic project of the artist. Thus, the hand is replaced by a detachable eye, sent out as a scout and who places himself under the folds of the skin, in various openings of the body and scans in the darkness of various cavities. Le coq ou la poule 1960, Auto- eye 1963, Ap with Unica 1961 (in Unica would have been just)
Even when the hand is apparent, it touches ever so ligthly the body-flower. $$ Hands of Half-bitchy girls blooming in furrows in the ground 1934 To accomplish this visual voyage under the best conditions the Ballmer’s figure is a body of what we can name low density. Entirely graphic body and whose openings let pass the ocular rays. With his anatomical cuts Bellmer does not use the lancet but rather the laser beams which mouve everywhere without leaving of trace. 2 diapos $$ The inside and the outside of these figures are bound, they become multiple, and the glance is lost in a maeize of lines and loops, scattered on the surface With those ghost-like body-architectures, the features of an extreme precision are interplayed sometimes by other contours, to became “figures of indecision”, between resemblance and disappearance At Bellmer, as at Dali, the woman is spectral. Anges de Beaumelle, in a stimulating article, precisely quotes Dali “I declare that any new sexual attraction from women will come of the possible use of their spectral capacity and resources, that is to say from their possible dissociation, their carnal and luminous decompositions …Woman will become spectral by the disarticulation and deformation of their anatomy”. Spectral woman or woman-flower, woman where there is no any separation between the skin and the flesh, being entirely made up of successive layers, like the petals that Bellmer peels away patiently. One cans see this flower with this collage “in souvenir to my wife” $$ with this small knife, maybe a tool for peeling delicately The woman-flower, the rose, is already a commonplace and returns to the surrealist iconography. With Bellmer, its always a rose, which appears sometime even with the Poupée$$ Bellmer uses the rose sometime in the title Rose ouverte la nuit (Rose open at night$$ But this drawing shows us what I would call the esthetic limits of Bellmer. One can see that the inside of the body, the organs seem undisturbed, perfectly designed, without any traces of flesh blood or fluids. One can clearly see the difference with the other bodies made in wax by Clemente Susini where the guts, the womb are shown in much more crude, repulsive way.$$ Le beau corps is opening himself and showing the sticky and revolting flesh.(obviously, this way of representations illustrates perfectly the famous texts of the church about the female body) The figures of Bellmer seem far away from those bodies. Strangely enough they coincide with the representation of the scorché as we know it $$ $$écorché Gerard David, the suplice The écorchés are shown as it would be possible to skin the epidermis like an external envelope, a light and almost transparent cloth, without disturbing the order and the integrity of the inside organs. The skin is only a cover and not a part of the flesh. In some way the images of Bellmer remind me of the Self-portrait by Christian Schad, 1927$$ where the skin looks like a swet shirt that one can take of without any effect on the rest of the body. One can say that Bellmer woman have something similar with the structure of the mille-feuille cake, a way of diverting the title which one finds several times at Bellmer :$$ “miles filles$$1939. $$ Those thousand layers are another strategy to insure itself against the surprise, that to be vis-à-vis the formless flesh, vis-à-vis of what Bataille names* “the work of a violent discord of the organs” where, “the eyes are struck with what is impossible to see, flowing into fear and the laughter” (We have to remember the reaction vis-a-vis Manet’s Olympia, which was precisely aggressiveness and snigger, The critics mentioned the dirt of her feet, a way to evoke the introduction of the impurity into this idealized universe of naked female. Olympia, moreover, which finds its final version with Dubuffet$$,1950_51 this scabby and crushed body, contrary to the belmerien idealization, and where the flesh carry signs of violent tactility. In its will to call into question the idealization of the erotic, idealization since always related to visual, this setting in distance, Bataille preaches for ” “knowledge by setting in contact”. It is only by attaching the importance to the formless matters, the baseness, that one can, according to him, go until this extreme where pleasure and the dislike coincide and cancel themselves. For Bataille, the body is not this harmonious organization but rather an object dedicated to the distruction. Formless matter, biasness, tactility, dislike, those things do not have their entry in the graphic and immaterial universe of Bellmer. His work is a machinery of high precision, which shows us the operation of the desire in the same way that an engineer would propose an improchable prototype, unaware of any obstacle that the reality can present. (Designs for the machine-gun in a state of grace, 1937”). In other words, the work of Bellmer is a work without friction, without resistance. For Bellmer, this image of the woman as a perfect antomique mechanism of desire is much more convincing than the practice of love. The sexual act, we know, introduces the violence, the aggressiveness, the tear and the rip in the body, all the signs which are absent in the world of the German painter. Bellmer, in fact, seems incapable of destruction, incapable of showing the material, the flesh. His sexual virtuosity is of the same type that his graphic virtuosity, the trajectories of desire become energy lines, fluid and perfectly controlled, a well-oiled machine. Wieland Schmidt describes with reason the work of this engineer of Eros as “cool and controlled precision”; Of course, the organs are misplaced or even turned upside down but more like in a jigsaw-puzzle-, a jigsaw-puzzle maybe impossible to reconstruct 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 different of those, for example, of Artaud$$$, with his famous body without organs) or organs without body In a way the system of Bellmer is expressed in the ball and socket joint, the perfect mechanism that makes the second Poupée function smoothly. Still, the doll, la Poupée, is an exception in this universe where cruelty and beauty are declined harmoniously. $$La Poupée, indeed, seems like a more banal body, treated with less sophistication. Bellmer adds atributs more trivial, a less tempting fetishism (the shoes and the white socs have an aspect more daily than the usual high-heel boots. At the same time the body looks clumsier, awkward, even a bit helpless, far from the positions of sexual acrobats out of Bellmer repertoire. But especially, the strong impact that it has on the viewer is coming form the face. Contrary to the drawn bodies, sometimes with the absent face, sometimes with the face perfectly stereotyped, Lolita style, the face here expresses concern, distress, anguish. Even the hairstyle always organized in perfect curve, loses its perfection. The Poupée is a hustled, forced, maybe even assaulted and not only transformed body.
At this point I will not follow Wieland Schmidt who considers that in Bellmer word nothing is forced and the victim’s is always consenting to his situation, rouling out any idea of a rape. I don’t know if one can speak about rape, but the Poupée is probably the only body to undergo what looks like a real violence, a cruelty that escapes from the sophisticated and voluptuous mise en scene, that always fascinates but seldom is deeply moving. The question is if the universe of Bellmer is still subversive? In Whitechapell, more than in any other place one could hardly answer no. But probably less subversive than it was in his time. Not only because of the shift in the way that the society looks upon sexuality. More so because of other bodies, other form of violence and crudity, one would even dear say authenticity, that we have seen in the mine time. (Dubuffet$$, Fautrier, being in Britain, one think immediately about Bacon and Lucien Freud and other examples De Kooning $$ etc. Strangely enough, and that will be the conclusion of my presentation, some of the new bodies which appeal to me are those maid par woman artist. Rosemarie Trockel, Annette Messenger, Maria Lessing, Jana Sterbak Eva Hesse, Magdalena Abakanowicz succeeded, it seems to me it to show the body from inside, directly or in a metaphoric way, but without any male violence. They all refer to a term witch bring us back to Bataille, the abject. The reflexion on this term, central in the speech of the American feminists, developed by Julia Kristeva, returns to all that repulses and fascinates at the same time. I will give only one example. The voyage of Hesse in its own universe is opposite of any idealization that glorifies the human body. It is rather the repulsive side, generally hidden and driven back, that proposes her artistic imagery, While avoiding any aimed descriptive, any direct allusions to the limbs and the internal organs, her works, nevertheless anthropomorphic, show the capacity of Eva Hesse to listen to the cycles of her organisme, to paint or carve, starting from her own body. Made from ropes and iron wire, $$Seven Poles, seem covered by body fluids, shows an organization which lost not only its skin but also its structure. Conections$$$$Inside is direct way to show what we ruther avoid seeing. I will finish with this small drawing, to some extent self-portrait, which gives the measure of a body, which is emptied, which liquefies slowly, without any resistance. Another way of showing the body by simply listening to it. Covered with ropes