Schiele: Memories and Genitals (Postcard #2)

The first time I recall seeing an Egon Schiele work in the flesh was in Copenhagen in 2002, at a mesmerizing exhibition of Klimt's and Schiele's erotic drawings. I remember encountering there a hunched man, of otherwise sophisticated bearing, awkwardly sloping through the gallery in a vain attempt to conceal the erection in his pants. At that moment, I arrived at a philosophy of aesthetic experience: Art should viscerally affect the viewer; if it doubles him over with a debilitating boner, even better.

I recently picked up this postcard of Schiele's "Lovers" (1914) after seeing the painting at the Neue Galerie in New York.  It could have just been the six dollar cup of coffee I had in the museum cafe-- so high-class they only fill the tasse 3/4 of the way--or the brief apoplectic fit it inspired, but I was in an exalted mood. Staring at this colossal painting in the cool, wood-sconced gallery while the city outside melted in its own summer soup, I was flooded with memories of my past Schiele experiences.

For me, this is one of the great, though admittedly self-absorbed, pleasures of coming across the work of a familiar artist in a gallery. The work serves as a kind of thematic memory portal. I can see my own biography strung together by a series of vignettes consisting of those particular moments in which Schiele was in my mental orbit. The postcard is the souvenir, the reminder of not just one visit to a particular museum but of an entire catalog of memories in which the creations of this strange mind from a strange time embedded their way into my life. There's my initial memory, the one captured by the postcard, and then there's my deeper memories branching off that memory, and all these memories are wrapped like ivy around the trunk of this foreign object called Egon Schiele.

My first Schiele vignette dates from sophomore year in college, a course called "Freud's Vienna." A ruddy-cheeked professor of German literature, a nervous, tweed-clad cherub wrapped in a bow tie, lecturing in fitful sentences about the fin-de-siècle anxiety of sex. Me, silently calibrating which of my classmates would, without clothes, best approximate the languid femme fatales of Klimt's paintings, while, at the same time, feeling more of an artistic affinity for the rough expressiveness of Kokoschka and Schiele.

There was my own crude copy, executed that year, of Schiele's "Seated Female Nude with Black Stockings" (1910). I had captured the unnerving aged-girlish face, but had not left enough room for the bottom half of the figure, which contained the two key ingredients of the work: the eponymous black-stockings and the trademark vermillion vagina (though that phrase sounds far too delicate and Latin for Schiele's brute, Germanic portrayal of genitals; 'red gash' would be more accurate). I solved my spacing problem by incorporating both the black stockings and the wiry-haired labia as font graphics into some homespun, highly ungrammatical German text beside the figure's face. A thorough disaster, fit for the dorm-room wall.

I later learned that Schiele's 'red gash' approach to female anatomy had an empirical basis.
He had spent the better part of 1910 drawing studies of patients at a Viennese gynecological clinic, an apprenticeship that no doubt colored his pathological depictions of the human form. Can you imagine: "Good morning, Frau Blücher, itchiness and discharge for the last five days, eh? Well, hop up in the stirrups and let's have a look. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot, this is Egon. He will be painting your vagina."  

Schiele was notoriously unorthodox in his selection of models. In addition to gynecology patients, he frequently did nude portraits of his sister Gertrude. Even more controversial was his practice of painting the sons and daughters of his neighbors-- particularly the young adolescent working-class girls whose lithe gauntness fit his ectomorph ideal. Needless to say, this did not go over well in small town Austria, where in 1912 the local court sentenced Schiele to 3 days imprisonment for showing erotic material to minors.  Lucky for us he is not a contemporary artist and this is all the fascinating lore of history, or else we would be gazing at Schiele not in museums but on the latest episode of "To Catch a Predator."

After college, while living in Prague as an apathetic teacher of English and aspiring artist of some kind, I made a Schiele pilgrimage to the fairytale Bohemian town of Cesky Krumlov-- the artist's onetime home (he knew it as Krumlau) and current home to the Egon Schiele Art Centrum. We stayed in a tapestried hotel that served a four-course breakfast with coffee that made my forehead sweat. I bought a fancy graphite pencil at the Schiele Centrum that I used the rest of that Czech autumn to draw naked ladies and write ideas for grandiose literary projects that I was too lazy and afraid to start.

Schiele started fast right out of the gates. By sixteen he had been accepted to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts-- the same school that would deny Adolf Hitler admission the following year. At seventeen, he befriended Klimt, the high priest of Austrian modernism, and quickly became an associate of the Secession movements throughout Central Europe. It's a good thing he started early, because by 1914 he was scooped up into the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Drawing his way into cushy clerical posts, Schiele made it through the war unscathed, only to be cut down by Spanish flu in 1918, three days after watching his pregnant wife succumb to the sickness. He was 28.

Schiele's art, like that of his contemporaries Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, occupies the bleeding borders of aesthetic categories, where the beautiful and the sublime converge at the grotesque. One senses this confluence even in his landscape paintings. The trees, the village, the land--all have the look of affliction, that distinctly haunting beauty that marks his diseased figures. I remember visiting the Belvedere in Vienna and realizing that "Cardinal and Nun" (1912)-- a painting of a man and woman of the cloth locked in erotic ecclesiastical embrace, another Schiele postcard in my collection-- evoked the same tense and morbid eroticism of some of his tree landscapes.

These days I'm slightly less moved and titillated by Schiele's penchant for shock than I was upon my first encounter with him in college. My jaw drops more over his sense of color and composition than it does over two clergymen making out. But I still appreciate the irreverence of a painting like "Cardinal and Nun," and it's easy to see it, along with Schiele himself, as a synedoche for the anxiety-charged cultural climate of Europe, especially Vienna, in the twilight years before World War One. Like his fellow Austrian and near doppelgänger, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Schiele marks a new breed of man for the twentieth century, agonizingly self-aware and attuned to despair.

Wittgenstein

Schiele

For that reason, the perverse embrace of "Cardinal and Nun" remains a good antidote to the all-too-palatable and ubiquitous image of Klimt's "The Kiss" plastered onto the coasters and lunch boxes hocked in museum gift stores. And Schiele remains a valuable image in my collection of postcards and memories.

Postkarten

After a year of online coma, Waxworks and Roustabouts is resurrected. And I'm playing a new angle: I'll be taking you on a virtual tour of my postcard collection-- a hodgepodge of historical photographs, artworks, and oddities I've acquired over the years. With each image, I'll include a short essay, a historical anecdote, a personal recollection, or, as in the case below, an imagined dialogue.  Hope you enjoy. 

How many minutes since the last shelling?

Too long.

Shall we have another?

I told you. I am not thirsty.

One for your friend, then. He must be thirsty. Where did you say you got him?

I heard a wailing from inside the collapsed bunker of the colonel. It was the colonel’s cat.

She was pregnant?

Her head was staved in. All her kittens were dead, except this one.

How did you feed him?

On a wheel of Camembert, hidden in the colonel’s desk drawer, along with a bottle of Armagnac.

The cat drinks Armagnac?

He is not a beer-swilling slob like you. Baudelaire is an aristocrat.

Baudelaire?

Oui.

Aren’t we supposed to be fighting the French? And you name your trench mascots after their poets?

We are not fighting anyone. I am fighting. You are turning a profit.

 Someone has to, or else you’d all be killing each other for nothing. Was Baudelaire the one who said “je suis l’Empire à la fin de la décadence”?

That’s Verlaine. “If rape and deadly poison, daggers and the flame have not embroidered some diverting scenery upon the boring canvas of our destiny, the slackness of our souls, alas! must be to blame." That’s Baudelaire.

Verlaine’s better.

Says the philistine. Drink your beer and be quiet.

When was the last time you were with a woman?

I despise women.

Sure, don’t we all, but that doesn’t stop me from plugging their holes.

Vulgarian.

Queer.

Don’t swear in front of Baudelaire.

The last time I was with a woman was in St. Pauli.  A great plump lump of a woman. With a tangle of blonde hair down below and a dirty ass.

Stop it.

I told her there was twenty extra marks for her if she spread her cheeks and—

I’ve already warned you.

Oh, come off it. You need a drink. It’ll take your mind off your dead boyfriend.

Don’t worry, Baudelaire, when he falls asleep, I’m going to gut him.

What did you say?

Nothing.

The war has changed you, Stefan.

The war has remade me. I resonate at a higher cosmic vibration now.

A higher cosmic vibration! That is priceless.

Your vision of reality is obscured by a thick coat of convention, but I see right through it.

I see a man with shot nerves who shakes so bad he’s one involuntary reflex away from breaking that cat’s neck. I see a man who’s staggering shame and self-contempt has fooled others into thinking he’s some kind of a stoic hero when really he’s just an aspiring suicide. How’s that for a thick coat of convention?

You are hurtling toward the abyss, Georg, only you’re too stupid to take notice.

Shall we play another round of skat, Stefan? Until the next shelling?

Yes, I suppose so. It’s Baudelaire’s turn to shuffle.


*Note: Further research reveals that this photograph is by the Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, and these are not men in a World War One bunker but German gravel-pit guardsmen from the early 1900s. That explains why one man is not wearing a uniform and one is. In fact, in light of this discovery, very little about this picture recalls World War One.  Oops. 

Dreaming inside Werner Herzog's Cave

Some thirty-two thousand years ago, someone in Southern France entered a dark cave above the Ardèche River and, by the light of a torch, created meaning with a piece of charred pinewood. He or she certainly was not the first to do so, but from our benighted historical perspective, shaped by the absence of evidence, this cave painter now stands at a make-believe beginning—as the first known one of us to escape the daylight and embark on the representational life.

In Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” the paintings from the toxic, radon-filled blackness of Chauvet cave feel like a blast of fresh air. That is, a blast of thirty-two-thousand-year-old fresh air. The paintings are more than twice as old as any other previously discovered cave painting. They were created at a time when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens still shared the frozen ground of Ice Age Europe.

Around twenty thousand years ago, the face of the limestone cliff above the river bed collapsed, effectively sealing off the cave from time — until 1994, when a group of explorers led by Jean-Marie Chauvet detected a small air shaft reaching up from the cave’s ceiling.

Inside, they found a time capsule of pristine beauty, one that offers us a tantalizingly dim view of life between thirty and twenty thousand years ago.

For ten thousand years, the cave’s galleries hosted a variety of artists. Some meticulously scratched away the surface of cave wall to a clean white canvas before filling it with delicately rendered charcoal- and sepia-toned depictions of horses, rhinoceroses, and lions. A later crooked-fingered artist adorned the walls with red ochre hand prints. Someone even painted the lower portion of a female human figure, in which a giant fertile-looking vagina grows into a furry bison head. And, in what is perhaps the earliest recorded act of art criticism, a curmudgeonly cave bear, upon encountering what then was already a five-thousand-year-old painting, ran his claws down the length of the work, as if to say, “You call this art?!”

With their deft lines, ingenious composition, and raw aesthetic verve, the images of Chauvet overwhelm you with the sheer duration of human cultural experience in its full symbolic richness. There is something heartening, even liberating, in contemplating this obvious truth. There is no human existence apart from culture, and our species’ existence is a long and varied, though fundamentally continuous, story that dwarfs our idea of history.

Herzog captures in moving (3D!) pictures the wonder of these suspended moments of human life from seemingly beyond the reach of time.  Seeing such vibrant, sophisticated evidence of life literally leap out at you from the unfathomable depths of the past is, to put it strangely, a visceral intellectual experience. The paintings in the cave serve as a sort of memento viviri: reducing the last five thousand years of our hand-wringing concerns to ephemera. I left the theater feeling dangerously light—as though my ninety-minute communion with primeval humanity had somehow unburdened me from the modern world.

Yet for all their radiance, the Chauvet paintings only heighten our awareness of the dark unknown in which our past is hidden.

Read the rest of this piece at Hypervocal.com  

The Populists' Billionaire and the Misbegotten Ones

Thank you, Donald Trump, for finally bringing the long marginalized issue of native birth to the forefront of the American political scene. Here I thought “birtherism” was a live issue only for ignorant yokels and racist crackpots. Turns out it’s also a serious concern for plutocratic celebrity whores—who also happen to be ignorant, racist crackpots.

But I find your nativism infectious. Now that we’ve cleared up the circumstances of President Obama’s birth, it’s time to investigate the shadowed origins of other American politicians. Seeing as how you’recurrently polling as the top GOP presidential candidate for 2012, let’s start with you, The Donald:

What unfortunate vagina did you pop out of, sir?

Or was it an anus?

I don’t mean to offend you, as I realize insulting a person so encased in his own narcissism is like trying to shoot the pope when he’s in his bullet-proof glass-encased pope-mobile.

But I ask only because your resemblance to a gilded, sun-bleached turd is uncanny. And the possibility of you being not a man but a megalomaniacal piece of excrement might pose citizenship problems.

Does floating in the befouled water of a Brooklyn toilet count as being born on American soil? I’m not so sure. I therefore demand you show the American people your birth certificate proving that you are of woman born.

But that’s just the beginning of my conspiracy theory. I also have a strong unfounded suspicion that Donald Trump is only one of many thousands in this country who claim to be natural-born Americans, but who are, in fact, high density formations of bowel movement.

These imposters constitute the overwhelming majority of the Tea Party movement. That they try so hard to cloak their dubious citizenship status behind American flags, tri-corner hats, and constitutional rhetoric betrays them only further (as though the maleficent odor wafting from their mouths didn’t already give them away).

What am I saying? That our nation is infested with an army of illegitimate ass babies posing as real American citizens? You said it. That means there are now two of us saying it, which means my conspiracy theory must be true.

Read the rest of this piece at Hypervocal.com  

Remembering Rotting Books in a Digital Age

“When it was proclaimed that the Library comprised all books, the first impression was one of extravagant joy. All men felt themselves lords of a secret, intact treasure. There was no personal or universal problem whose eloquent solutions did not exist—in some hexagon.”

Such were the optimistic beginnings of “The Library of Babel,” the Jorge Luis Borges story where all the books of the universe exist in a library composed of limitless hexagonal galleries.

But the dream of infinite knowledge soon proves a curse, as the scholars wandering the library’s vast holdings search in vain for a single meaningful sentence. In time, the marbled halls become overrun with disease, banditry, and mass suicide.

Now is a particularly good time to remember Borges’s library in all its prophetic glory and ruin. Only a few weeks ago, Google’s dreams of digital book dominion of Babel-like dimensions were dashed on the rocky shores of copyright law. But I’m not interested in discussing here the thorny issues of copyright infringement and the corporate monopoly of knowledge.

Instead, let’s consider the dream itself—the dream of a digital world library.

Google is only one possible player in this quest for the online unity of knowledge. Historian and Harvard librarian Robert Darnton has been an outspoken advocate for a free digital public library. Surely, this dream of a single accessible source for the whole of human knowledge, a dream that goes as far back as the Encylopedists of the Enlightenment, is shared by all literate and humane people. Everyone believes that putting the world’s books at our fingertips would be a democratic step forward for humanity, right?

Of course. Yet, deep down, part of me balks at this dream of unified digital knowledge, even though I can appreciate its many obvious virtues. At the risk of sounding like a premature crank, I’ll confess: the death of print and the rise of the universal digital age reasonably unnerve me.

Why? Because with every advance in technology comes loss. Modernity, as much as it appears to be an upward arc of progress and invention, is equally one of continual extinction and destruction.

Take, for example, the prosaic wonder of email, which puts us in instantaneous communication with the globe. But its instantaneous capabilities not only diminish the content of our letters—they also encode our words and thoughts in an immaterial form that, unless one has enough foresight and ego to print them out, will likely vanish into the ether.

As someone with a perhaps unhealthy love for reading the letters of dead men, I find the idea of a future bereft of the legacy of human correspondence deeply depressing.

We don’t need to think in great stretches of time here to appreciate this sense of loss. How, in 2060, will you reread all those romantic “love emails” (a comically vulgar term) you sent your now elderly wife back when you were wooing her in college on your long-terminated university email account? And how will all your witty emails speak to posterity after your own wit has withered to dust?

With the silence of ones and zeros, that’s how.

Read the rest of this post here at HyperVocal.com

Filling the Digital Gap: The Missing Wild Bill Hickock Page

My friend, the San Diego-based artist and tech geek Tim Schwartz, explores the losses that arise in the digitization of knowledge. One of his projects, "Wild Bill's Loss," examines the missing page of an 1867 article in Harper's about Wild Bill Hickock just after his showdown with Dave Tutt. The article helped turn the handsome gunslinger into a national legend. Having slipped past the gaze of the scanner, this page is now lost to posterity. In an effort to plug the digital hole of history, Tim asked several artists and writers to imagine what was on that page.

What follows is my version of that missing page. The italicized words at the beginning and end indicate what was on the preceding and proceeding pages, starting with "That man is the most remarkable charac-" and ending with "she must jump it; and at it she went with a big rush...."

----------------------------------

“That man is the most remarkable charac-ter artist I have ever seen. Just fix your eyes on that there cocktail napkin he was doodling upon. Why, he’s captured your likeness, Captain, in a most startling and peculiar fashion.”

“Yessir, Kernel, that’s Bill for yer,” replied the Captain. “Always fidgetin’ with his pencils. Ye can hardly can have a conversation or play a round of cards with the man without him scratchin’ out some pitchures, on nappins, barstools, hankerchiefs, what have yer. A feller’s got to mind his possessions, hell, even his person, when he’s in Bill’s company if he don’t want to end up sportin’ one of them funny faces.”

“You mean he draws on people?”

“I do indeed, sir.” Captain Honesty then leaned in close, puffing away at me with his whiskey-scented breath, and told me how a few months ago, before the showdown with Dave Tutt, Bill had drawn on Tutt’s cousin Edna as she lay passed out on the saloon bar.

Suddenly Mr. Tutt’s grudge against Wild Bill made more sense.

I held the damp drawing up to marvel at its masterly craftsmanship. Wild Bill had not once glanced at his hand the entire time he was conjuring the Captain’s portrait, which he had so casually dashed off and left to posterity in a puddle of beer. The Captain accepted his exaggerated likeness with a resigned humor. And a good thing, for many a lesser man might have failed to appreciate the artistic liberties Bill had taken in his depiction.

“Tell me, Captain, does he always draw his figures with such prodigious genitals?” I asked.

“Sure as a Rebel bleeds red,” he replied. “Bill slaps a pecker on anything with a face. Men, women, Injuns, politicians, horses, chickens, you name it. Hell, the whole damn town’s all marked up with Bill’s lead. And I don’t mean bullets, Kernel.”

It was true. When I departed the Captain’s company later that evening, I noticed in the red light of dusk how all the facades of Springfield bore the unmistakable mark of Wild Bill’s draughtsmanship.

“But why does he do it?” I asked.

“I asked him about it once,” Captain Honesty responded. I says to him, ‘Say, Bill, why come you always add a big ole peeder to every one of them pencil drawrins of yours?’ He told me he done it on account of a nervous affliction.”

“What?” I gasped. “An affliction of the nerves in that immaculate specimen? Impossible!” I asked the Captain just what sort of nervous affliction a man of such upright and masculine bearing and such a nobly sloped forehead as Wild Bill Hickock could have possessed.

“He says it was a habit he had acquired in his schoolin’ days and t’weren’t a thing he could do about it even he had a mind not to.”

“You mean to tell me, Captain,” I shouted, “that Wild Bill is an artist not by his own volition and is slave to uncontrollable and perverse urges?

“Please sir, keep your voice down!” the Captain begged me. “It’s not that Bill’s a madman, sir. Why, he’s as sober as a judge. But Bill wasn’t always a pistol man, you know. ‘Fore he came to the border, he growed up rich back in Baltimore, where his mother schooled him in the fine arts. Even taught him to play the viola. Well, Bill, as you now rightly know, had a fearsome talent for makin’ pitchures. He spent his days out in the gardens of the estate drawin’ neked marble statues or holed up in his daddy’s librurry copyin’ ole pitchures out of dusty ole books. Soon enough, he’d done drawn everything in the whole mansion, so his parents had no choice but to ship him off to Phillerdelphia for proper art schoolin.”

“That’s, as Bill told me, where the trouble begun. ‘When I showed up in Phillerdelphia,’ he said, ‘I fell drop-dead in love with the first girl I seen. A gal prettier than all them Roman goddesses I’d tickled with my pencil back in Baltimore. But there was one problem. She was the Mayor of Phillerdelphia’s daughter.’ Course, the mayor’s daughter fell harder n’ rocks for Bill, too. But the mayor would have none of it. Said he would sooner sell his daughter off to white slavers in Arabia ‘fore he’d give his daughter to a degenerate artist from Baltimore.”

“Course, Bill swallowed the mayor’s venom real calm-like. He just looked him square in the melon till the man shouted hisself hoarse. But then, sure enough, the next day, flyin’ atop city hall, draped over William Penn’s statue was a huge brightly-colored canvas depictin’ the mayor of City Hall neked as a jaybird, abusin’ hisself with the Liberty Bell. ‘Twas the only man who ever insulted Wild Bill and didn’t wind up with a bullet put through his heart. But ever since that day, Bill told me, he’s suffered from his nervous affliction.”

“And you can reckon what happened from there,” said Captain Honesty. “Bill had to skedaddle right quick, for there warn’t no brotherly love left for him in Phillerdelphia. But just to spite the mayor further, he had his daughter meet him one last time for a farewell tryst out in the woods and had her come with the mayor’s prize hoss, Black Nell. Bill kissed his gal goodbye and rode off on Black Nell.

"Now, you can be sure the mayor nearly burst his necktie when heard his best hoss was stolen. He sent his meanest henchmen after Bill. But Bill rode like black lightnin’ across them Alleghenies and by the time they caught up with him, Bill had swapped his paintbrushes for shootin’ irons and was clear over in Kentucky— where I was stationed at Fort Knox. In fact, that were the first time I laid eyes on Wild Bill. I was out on detail in the woods outside Louisville when I see Bill shoot through the clearing on Black Nell just ahead of the mayor’s boys and headed straight for a stone wall. But Bill didn’t slow one bit. Instead he just whispered in Black Nell’s ear, tellin’ her she must jump it; and at it she went with a big rush. I never saw a more magnificent sight. Bill gave the mare her head, and turning in his saddle fired twice, killing both of his pursuers….