The Odalisque Suite began with my curiosity about representations of the reclining female nude in Western art, and I developed the project from that point of view. After completing the project the limits of the research became obvious. Why just Western art? Why not gay or lesbian images? Or female artists? Perhaps I will, at some point, find reason to expand the suite, but then I will be asking different questions. In fact, I have tiptoed into the East: Japan and India; but that outreach has happened primarily to compare cultural attitudes about sex and sexuality that have arisen as a result of the progress of the project. The above questions are best answered by characterizing myself as the man whose wife was recently introduced to an eclectic audience as a “flaming heterosexual.” Flaming heterosexual is who I am in terms of my history: my inherited point of view, my predominant interest, and the repository of the issues that I relationally need and want to work out for myself.
Along its path the project collected several vessels containing subtle, but I think provocative, issues; but it wasn’t until I decided to take the project into the realm of what is commonly (I think in every sense of the word) termed pornography that a shift in my perspective about the piece occurred. I had not been aware of the extent of my emotional investment in this area, and was surprised to find myself enveloped by a gauze-like film of prejudice; a net which had been cast by the proletarian ethos from where I started.
Even more unexpected was the realization that my life experience had not given me an openness, nor even an armor, which would allow this move to be simply another additive step in the project. Before I could begin the selection and production of these specific pieces, I became subordinate to my predilections about this open assertion (the word blatant seems too judgmental) of sexuality, the issues of psychology and commercialism around the women modeling, and the implications concerning pornography as art.
When I was a young teenager living in Venice, California, there were forerunners of today’s so-called porn magazines. The soft-covers addressed to teens were titillating, but not overly descriptive. There were other, underground, publications that were more explicit. Some contained photographs and printed text; but the most popular, commonly referred to as “Tiajuana Bibles”, were small format (as I remember about 3″ high by 5″ wide) cartoon books. The text and images were as graphic as most magazines published today. In addition, a friend and I occasionally patronized the burlesque houses in downtown L. A.
Given this early experience, in addition to later life experience, I was literally stunned by the hesitancy and uncertainty I felt around stepping in this direction.
A second consideration has to do with the conflict between sexual awareness and morals. I naively expected that by the time I reached adulthood these kinds of issues would have been reasonably resolved; but ferocious disputes around the areas of sex education, pornography, promiscuity, etc., are still rampant. Much of this comes from people who, in youth, gleefully exposed themselves to the same material I had. It seems the arbitrary messages I received when I was young, which I thought I understood as superficial, remained dormant until I was confronted by their incongruity. The conversation around sexual morality is like a metalogue wherein the issue being discussed is not the content of the conversation.
Third is sex. The actual experiencing of sex and sexuality seems to be tangential to the issues I am raising here. Because of that I have a need to try, at least for myself, to clarify the difference. Although interlaced, one’s interest and activities in sex and one’s tendency toward sexual voyeurism and fantasy appear to dwell in different domains. In the area of fantasy there reside issues about the ideal and the unattainable that conflict with our ability to experience the participatory now; except in terms of acknowledging them as viable entities. One might satiate oneself in sexual activity and assuage their desire for the other; but I expect that other desire will reappear at some point. Or one might try to incorporate the fantasy within their sexual experience (Carnal Knowledge comes to mind), but the ideal cannot, for long, tolerate the now.
I had reproductions of about thirty paintings taped to my studio wall, but it took months to fully comprehend the significance of the creating artist. Not only does an artist reveal their attitudes, desires and preferences within a work, but the artwork also becomes a self-portrait in that it cannot depict anything more than the totality of what the artist knows and thinks and is. When we see a painting of a human model, we are not seeing the actual model (in fact what we see goes through several translational layers, including one or two of our own as viewer/interpreter). What we do see is the artist’s interpretation of that person as perceived through their perceptual screen; their prejudices and preferences, which may be reread as how the artist sees or would or would not like to see their self.
I wanted to learn more about the relationship between the model’s depiction, the painting and the creator. How much is context and how much is intention? What is gender? Is there a possibility that gender, rather than being limited to a few broadly described designations, can reside in any location within the full spectrum of personality characteristics? Do we subconsciously compel our bodies to conform to a list of prescribed attributes? What real
relationships do our ideas about gender have to our sexual characteristics (including
physiology) and habits? This is where my original curiosity and desire began to transform in deference to where the project wanted to go.
Take the series of reclining nudes from the Venuses to Olympia. What does that kind of
depiction refer to now? What is the distance between desire and lasciviousness? What are the moral determinants? We see the rendering of an unnamed female in repose, unclothed and apparently disinterested about this representation of her being seen publicly. Much of the time she is looking directly at us, the viewer, the user. Sometimes she is labeled goddess, other times royalty, wife, lover, or simply anonymous.
Or look at three of Titian’s Venuses: the Lute, Urbino and Organist. In the first she is represented as a goddess posed in the ways that I am used to seeing. She appears distant,
separate and generally unconcerned abut anyone else’ presence. In Urbino she is a participant in a “real” environment, part of a household; as we might be, given equal status. She is still unconcerned about our attendance (it is really the artist there), but she is very aware of it. She seems to challenge us to appraise and acknowledge her body and her female person. In Organist, she is again a goddess, but the painting seems more current because sex and lust are acknowledged openly through the organist’s stare. But is it really the women who are gazing at us?
Goya and Manet continued the representation of the Venus Urbino in ‘Maja Desnuda” and “Olympia.” In all three pieces there appears to be an encounter between the figure and the
viewer. The images feel present and assertive. Are these later artists using the Urbino as a
vehicle for capturing the stage of sexuality that Titian had attained when he painted it or are they asserting that they have arrived? At some point after these paintings the odalisques began to get stylish and characterization of the figure was rivaled by the compositional vision, as in Matisse or Picasso. The best of these combine their style or expression with an effective sense of the person or sexuality or lust.
What is the distance between desire and transformation? Between other and self? When we look at the odalisque, who are we seeing? Whose feelings of lust are we sensing? I want to say here that I am trying to lightly, but perhaps too obviously, steal around the issue of male dominance in terms of this genre and the milieu the artists were working within because I want to arrive at other issues of interest to me. However, I do need to interpose that the social structure and the status of women in relation to men, and vice versa, is inherent in this conversation and has interest in terms of the way in which women participated in these projects. For example, what was the complicity between women and men that led to the accomplishment of these projects? What were the power agreements, implicit and explicit, during the various eras? What machinations and subterfuges, if necessary, occurred between genders? What did men and women want to learn from each other?
Between 1910 and 1915 Egon Schiele produced a series of pieces that researched and
expressed his vision of Eros. Although there are several pieces that show two women together, I found no representations of multiple males. The images are generally erotic, but the pieces feel like studies. They have no internal context, except for the intimation (because they are obvious poses) that the artist is present. They seem very much to be a response to what Schiele wants to see; what he sees within himself.
Adriana is an Hustler Magazine centerfold. Hustler models not only bare it; they also hold it open. At first glance I created presumptions about Adriana and her background. My connection with the sexual imagery, the turn on, included my mental reference to the pervasive notions I had learned about those suppositions. It seemed important, somehow, for me to create a story or fantasy around whom she was and what kind of life she might have had. During the savoring of this fiction, I suddenly realized that Adriana’s history was perhaps different from what I had first conjured. I was astonished and embarrassed by the immediate revision that my assumptions took; as if a movie reel was replaced within my skull and an entire new fiction was rolling behind my eyes.
It is extraordinarily humbling to realize, and to acknowledge to oneself, the biases and prejudices with which one exists.
The artist is not simply the creator of the odalisque; they are the embodiment of it in every sense of that word. Alongside the contextual dictates of their time, it is the artist’s thinking and emotion being depicted. We should be able to see their level of awareness of their feelings about sensuality and sexuality through their work. We should be able to know their image within their statement.
We are also seeing evidence of their understanding and relationship to female. This female is not simply the female they visualize, it is the female they want to have, of the female they want to be, or the gender they are. It is possible that these ideas, or images, are the same. It is the fantasy, the ungraspable, the unattainable. . . .
I am the picture. I see myself framed as I believe others see me . . . . that I occurred at all (if even I only knew).
What brings it on . . . that rush from the aroma that pervades the rustled sheets and bedclothes – as Oshima saw it – the continuing vapor that lingers from one act of lust to the next, to the next. . . . One wants to demystify the sense of lurking and wantonness that accompanies each voyeuristic foray but always, it seems, due to the centuries of edict and censure erected by one’s judeo-christian ancestors, one returns to the guilt-rebellion dyad.
It is fascinating to appraise the pictorial images in Playboy and Hustler and observe how the presentations have been enhanced to approach what our minds consider to be an ideal
sexuality. The ideal is, as previously stated, unattainable; however, it seems like the “idea” of the unattainable is somehow beneath what drives this entire venture. The “unattainable” is not simply the model who is posing; she might be very available if one cared to make the effort. It is the representation within the image, which does not and never can exist in concrete reality.
It’s the flesh! One wants to wallow in it, to immerse oneself, to sink, to roll in it. One wants to touch it, to allow one’s skin to slide smoothly and effortlessly on her skin; to affect and effect her sensuality and sexuality. To come in contact with what is not available. To break the restraints that prevent one from indulging in the fantasy that a two-dimensional representation not only signifies; but in actuality is, the untouchable object that it represents.
For me this all goes back to Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” and before that to the Greeks and back further to depictions of Egyptian female royalty. The representations of women in these visions are unattainable in that they embody royalty (protected, withheld), the ideal (semantically created), or relationship to god (imagined). These systems of representation have continued to the present, and our affinity with contemporary images feels like it contains connections that are outside the domain of everyday experience. In fact certain aspects of our relation to these images feel like they contain a desire to elude the every day reality of decision-making, involvement, and presence. Our desire is at once real and not real. It is the momentary indulgence that allows us to masturbate our feelings and get on with our business.
Then there is mother. What if mother had been attainable? If “mother” is involved in this
equation, the conflict between looking and not-looking becomes clearer. Societally, the right time for “looking” is not addressed well (there seems first a requirement to acquire hesitation and guilt). Even those times when sexual activity is acceptable, it seems the act of looking, gazing at, and appraising the human body can be difficult and complicated. One considers Indian, Pakistani and Nepalese monuments and temple carvings that existed long before the word abstinence (each salacious depiction hanging near another, or intertwined one to another, or side by side; displayed as if they are a storyboard or a public reading in the ancient equivalent of a library). One has to wonder, if not marvel, that the repressive and duplicitous connotations of concepts such as permissiveness, looseness, abstinence, and of course, pornography exist in contemporary society.
The Swiss banking and political establishments, and perhaps much of its populace, had been able to disguise their bigotry and deceit under the rubric of honor and neutrality for over fifty years; similar to the problem the people of the United States have about resolving our duplicity regarding human rights versus the status quo and profits. The semantic screen that works to prevent us from clearly understanding such issues reminds me about Ouspensky’s discussions concerning knowledge. Questions like who and what are the initiated, what are the ways to enter knowledge, and what are the reasons for disguising knowledge come to mind.
Within the context of the Odalisque Suite the questions are similar. What is sexuality and gender in the context of relating? What is the configuration of the complex fabric that complicates the issues around sexuality and gender? How do sexuality and gender relate to perception? How does knowledge inform these and vice versa?
At first glance the Odalisque Suite is about time; a time that is elongated into centuries, but quickly compresses into a shallow space that gives one the feeling of change without change. It reminds one of the assumption that everywoman experiences internally the full breadth of Olympia, from Titian to Flynt (acknowledging that by no means do the odalisques represent a full range of sexually relational characteristics), that everyman (not being able to presume for women) fantasizes engagement with all these personas, and that everywoman perceives men apprehending her in these ways. Not simply a range of possibilities, these arrangements have propagated an expanse of fabrications and unrealities; a network, as it were, of truths, deceits, and myths intertwined in such a way that the familiar is composed of any combination of relational beliefs.