Portraits of a Pope

Portraits of a Pope—
(Study On Velásquez's Portrait
of Pope Innocent X 1953)

—after Bacon/Velásquez

“single-minded urgency”

“Bacon’s 8 studies of pontiff portraits”

“like successive frames in a film”

“series—variations on a theme”

“a practice that comes naturally”

“strongly obsessive nature”

“deliberately disingenuous”

“without false fauve manner”

“screaming Velásquez popes”

“religious icons, fetishistic idols”

“every change made loses what is already

there in the hope of making a fresh gain”

“Tangier…gilded exile”

“flotsam of the bars”

“Soho off-limits”

Portrait of a Pope

Portrait of a Pope—
(Ratzinger 2012)
—after Bacon/Velásquez

“The thing that has never been
fully worked out is how photography
has completely altered figurative
painting. Velásquez has been
taken over by something else.”
—Francis Bacon

Jonathan Katz and "Hide/Seek"

Breakup: Johns / Rauschenberg

Jonathan Katz and “Hide/Seek”

http://www.youtube.com/tacomaartmuseum#p/a/u/2/b9bOaNV9NSI

“You can show things
in paintings that you
can never get away
with in print.”
—Jonathan Katz,
Tacoma Museum of Art
July 28, 2011

Jonathan Katz recently gave a fascinating lecture on the National Portrait Gallery’s cancelled show—“Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the Tacoma Museum of Art (July 28, 2011),

“Hide/Seek” was the first major museum exhibition to address gender and sexual identity. Katz explained the politics of the NPG’s selection process & the delicate problem of getting permission from other galleries for the glbt “Hide/Seek” portraits.

The complexities & controversies surrounding the original NPG show could be a published in a separate book or become a film in itself. The Tacoma Museum of Art decided to showcase “Hide/Seek.” Then it invited Jonathan Katz to Tacoma to discuss the show’s portraits.

Jonathan Katz has given us West Coast gays & lesbians—a calm, fascinating, professional, very insightful lecture on some of the NPG portraits themselves. Which is after all what the “Hide/Seek” show was all about in the first place.

As a writer, I usually attend readings or lectures by literary critics—so I found Katz’s delivery to be uniquely different and very helpful for me to understand this visual aspect of the glbt revolution more clearly—just as the film critic David Gerstner has done with his recent excellent book, “Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic” (2011).

Both Katz & Gerstner concentrate on one of the most exciting aspects of the glbt revolution—in particular for me how gay artists, poets, writers, filmmakers “portray” their subjects and “portray” themselves in this complex “virtual homophobia” zeitgeist we’re going through.

According to Katz, there’s a struggle even battle that goes on between the “sitter” who wants his own contemporary image to shine & prevail over others—versus the portraitist himself/herself who struggles with this “sitter” so that as an artist, cineaste & writer their glbt POV prevails in the usual hetero soup de jour we swim around in.

In fact, according to Katz, the country has lost something very valuable from the past—and that is the postwar annulment of “queer-straight” commonality which was present throughout America in the early twentieth century. Believe it or not, there was a Whitman-esque “adhesiveness” that prevailed & was portrayed by “queer-straight” art and literature. Things haven’t always been as tense as they are now.

Katz traces this “queer-straight” controversial realignment & failed détente to WWII. Many were worried in Europe, especially England, that the future of Western Culture was at stake. E. M. Forester when asked what made western civilization possible or survivable—mentioned the “Aristocracy of the Sensitive.” (1938)

Paul Cadmus, Forester’s artist friend & colleague, said it in a different way—with a “portrait” painting of himself, his lover & their friends entitled “What I Believe” (1947). This kind of portrayed “glbt adhesiveness” was more direct and could say things that literary Forester couldn’t say. Gay intelligentsia may be another phase for “aristocracy of the sensitive.”

During the conservative cold-war witch-trial McCarthy Era is when we gay intelligentsia & aristocrats of the sensitive—were discriminated again, hunted down & black-listed, purposely made an enemy-of-the-state. Rather than the “lynchpin” of western civilization, we were treated with “lynch-parties” like the blacks in the south.

Has this postwar “virtual homophobia” changed much since the postwar period? Hardly, my dears. The National Portrait Gallery flap & the earlier anti-gay “Mapplethorpe-Mandingo” controversy over “The Man in the Polyester Suit”—these and other quasi-political, quasi-religious, quasi-queer “Encounters of the GLBT Kind” continue don’t they?

Queer portraiture as well as queer portraitists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz will probably always be “politically incorrect” in the US. Although the “body-politic” POV towards us seems to be changing somewhat as the “same-straight” osmosis between us & them continues to ooze together somewhat—as with most constipated blockage issues such as DADT & DOMA over time.

Marriages & divorces aren’t easy for gays or str8ts—I suppose that’s why Katz’s thoughts on Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were very touching and fascinating for me. How these two artists were married together and then divorced themselves—is something most of us have gone through I’m sure.

Most of us don’t do “portraits” of such a difficult rite de passage however—and both these men did, perhaps they had to, both fearing the loss of their creative powers after such a traumatic separation. Every couple’s different I suppose—but with these two modern artists the “divorce portraiture” was more than difficult. It was a matter of psychic & artistic survival—like Siamese twins being cut apart.

Robert Rauschenberg portrayed gay divorce with “Cantos XIV” (1959) based on Dante & the sodomites. Jasper Johns portrayed the Rauschenberg divorce with “Souvenir” (1964)—although both artists probably did many portrayals of this period in their lives.

I’m sure many astute art critics have already analyzed the nuances of this “divorce portraiture” process—something that was still in the “virtual homophobia” closet when they were together.

When Robert Rauschenberg passed away several years ago, the NYTimes made note of his brief, early marriage, but tiptoed thru the tulips as far as his longtime marriage with Jasper Johns.

How discrete of the Old Grey Lady—who continues to trash gays as with the rather maudlin Hart Crane trashy review by William Logan “Hart Crane’s Bridge to Nowhere” (1/28/2007).

This so-called “virtual homophobia” in the arts that Katz alludes to—reveals itself in this particularly bitchy essay by Miss Logan of Langdon Hammer’s “Complete Poems and Selected Letters” edition by The Library of America:

“Crane tried on various identities as a young man and failed at most of them. He was frank about his homosexuality only with close friends—his sexual appetites were voracious and involved far too many sailors. (The definitive work on the United States Navy’s contributions to cruising has yet to be written.)”

Virtual homophobia sure can get dishy, can’t it?

“Crane dreamed of being a poet much more often than he sat at his desk and wrote poems; and he was forever complaining in letters that he had no time to write, though he found plenty of time to drink. He conceived his major poem, “The Bridge,” as early as 1923 but made only desultory progress toward it. (Remaining drunk all through Prohibition proved surprisingly easy.) It was hard work, avoiding real work; but Crane became an expert at writing cadging letters to his divorced parents and playing one against the other.”

This kind of treatment is what Johns and Rauschenberg would have got—and perhaps they did? As with Mapplethorpe and Wojnarowicz—as well as Oscar Wilde and many of the Hollywood black-listed writers and directors.

Rauschenberg’s "Canto XIV" with its circle of hell in Dante's Inferno—where sodomites are forced to run barefoot in hot sand. Both Dante and Rauschenberg—as well as Johns and others knew only too well about the “queer-straight” lack of commonality which has existed for glbt lovers.

Rather than commenting on “Canto XIV” or “Souveier” any further than the professional critics have already done—let me just say that my reponse to these two divorce portraits was to do my own amateur portrait version of the Johns-Rauschenburg separation at the beginning of this essay, entitled simply “Breakup.” Based on a snapshot—with the third-party divorcee individual in between the two disenchanted artists…

Lizard Art

Lizard Art

“How singularly
innocent I look
this morning.”
—Waldo Lydecker

Lizard art: Dig it or run for your life. These new large scale paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Alphonse Dick explore the margins between lizard and myth. Dick’s work is a synthesis of human and snake libido.

These creatures & their captives are true to life in size and shape—unbelievable, impossible to comprehend as human. The poor mortal model’s faces obviously mirror their unease, yet butchy gentility and cultivation prevails. Alphonse Dick leaves visible the seams in his snake nightmares, reminding the viewer that the reptilian and human is coexisting in these striking portraits.

Alphonse Dick asks us to embrace contradiction and question man's uncertain relationship with his latent underlying lizard violence—so shamelessly unsheathed just beneath the guise of Dick’s control.

As Waldo Lydecker the famous art critic notes in his NYTimes review, “Becoming Snake: Evolution and Human Uniqueness,” our human features sometimes get distorted and metamorphosed into their own demonic doubles—unnatural, pealed-back, foreskin-esque. Our serpent heritage has allowed for an enormous range of subversively misunderstood erotic expressions.

The ability to provoke outrage, fear, shame, sympathy and even worse emotions—has helped humankind to create an uncivilized culture based on cold-blooded reptilian mistrust in others through these universally misunderstood lizardy expressions.

Perhaps Alphonse Dick’s creatures are evidence of our twisted human condition—striving to disprove a troubling disenchanting déjà vu existence we sometimes experience in our human past. Yet undoubtedly these same wild animalesque feelings may indeed feel the same way about us.

These painting’s unsympathetic lizard faces and the human ones tinged with sexual lust, boredom and disgust question what it is to be human or beast.

Organized by the Claire Crumb Gallery, New York City, with the generous assistance of the artist for the BP Museum of Art.

I Married a Lizard from Outer Space

I Married a Lizard
from Outer Space

Naturally, I was looking forward to a deliriously romantic honeymoon—having just got married to the most beautiful, sexiest woman in the world.

Unfortunately, though, this supposedly “most sexy chick in town" turned out to be nothing more than—a Lizard from Outer Space!!!

On the outside—she was tall, dark, charming and so very enjoyable. I had a decent job at Wal-Mart—selling tires and automobile equipment. I was the top salesman in fact—all the women customers liked & trusted me. I was pretty smart and knew my stuff. I thought she loved me—but what a fool I was. I had no idea she was a LIZARD—a cold-blooded nefarious alien Lizard from another world. A Lounge Lizard —from Outer Space!!!

It was just awful—our supposedly romantic sexy honeymoon at the No Tell Motel at Niagara Falls. I wasn’t promiscuous like all those other guyz at Poughkeepsie High. I didn’t mess around with all those lascivious cute pimply-faced bad girlz—the easy ones who went down on those pushy arrogant muscular Porky Pigs on the Poughkeepsie football team. They tried to get me drunk on weekends—out there at the Snake Pit Drive-In under the stars. But I stayed virgin and chaste to the end—I wasn’t some tacky hustler like all those other guyz...

It’s all my fault, I suppose though—because I fell head over heels for this Snake from Outer Space. I should’ve known better—skanky Snakes from outer space are no different than the terrestrial ones who dated the Porky Pigs. Was I any better though?

Lueez & I ended up living in the local white trash Zero Trailer Park in the back of the city dump. Of all the Tramps in the Universe—I had to get stuck with a Tramp from Planet Zero. There in the Zero Trailer Park. Zero love, Zero sex—Zero everything. It was just awful the way it worked out—but then things got worse...

Lueez's debonair mild-mannered slick-chick façade—it was all fake. There was this monster from outer space behind her polite disguise. They’d landed just outside of town—a whole gang of extraterrestrial creatures. These Lizards oozed their way slowly into town—hanging out at the local bars on weekends. My so-called wonderful wife was assigned the job of Top Priority Nasty Duty #1—getting to know just how easy Earth boyz were.

It was rumored all over the Milky Way that us Earth boyz were easy that way—that’s what all those Grade-B teenage sexploitation movies at the Snake Pit Drive-In were all about. “Teenagers from Outer Space,” “Mars Needs Women,” “The Monster from the Black Lagoon,” “Zontar the Thing from Venus,” “Attack of the Giant Shrews,” “The Giant Gila Monster”—all those crummy sexist Grade-B drive-in flicks. There were just excuses for stupid high school guyz—to neck around and get to know just how easy chicks could be. Actually it was the other way around...

It was just awful—those atrocious double-features out there in the fuckin' sticks under the greasy old K-Y full moon. All that crummy stale popcorn, those awful hot dogs and slurpy, noisy Orange Crushes mixed with vodka. The endless weed & speed & acid trips: all cheap aphrodisiacs.

Those Passion Pits outta the ‘50s and ‘60s are all gone now—abandoned weedy parking lots, ancient ruined relics of us skanky Baby Boomers growing up back then. All those junkers & muscle-cars all the guys drove around in—chopped '57 Chevy's, tons of Ford pickups, a few lumbering, chrome-hog Cadillacs & DeSoto's. Later the sleek garish '59 Fins, Big V-8 engines, used Trojans left scattered in the dirt, sobbing virgins mostly boyz.

Lots of cars, booze, dope, rubbers, popcorn...plus lots of Big Egos. I don’t get nostalgic for any of those days one little bit—because that’s how I ended up Married to a Lizard from Outer Space!!!

"Jeeze, Lueez!!!" I'd say. You want it again? Wasn't once enough, darling? I don't know if I can do it again. That's when she'd go down on me & get a second wad. She gummed me to death; she was pretty good at it. But still I ended up bruised and black & blue. If I only knew... "The Thing" from outer space was actually in the backseat & not up there on the screen.

Being married to a Snake from Outer Space—it was a really skanky thing to happen to a guy. Lueez wasn’t just a normal run-of-the-mill slimy bug-eyed slimy monster. No, No, Nanette. She was the Pits. I just had to end up getting stuck with the biggest & ugliest Slut there was in town—that was somehow my biggest mistake. There’s nothing worse than a gnarly alien ugly Snake—a Skank like Lueez can really fuck a guy's life over.

You know what they say—in sickness and in health? Until death do you part? That’s what happened to me—I almost kicked the bucket in bed one time. Lueeze was pealing my cheesy uncut foreskin back one time. Before blowing it or sitting on it for a long pony ride.

I lit a cigarette & happened to look down at her. Only to have a bug-eyed Lizard creature look back up at me!!! She'd always insist on making love in the dark... she said was shy & felt ashamed about sex. That didn't stop her from draining me every night...fucking it, sucking it and getting her extra-long tongue up my asshole when she rimmed me all the time.

Big mistake... flicking my Bic that night. I got to see my wife as she really was... and it wasn't pretty. She didn't look human... her face was more like an Iguana lizard from down there in Mexico. She had this big slimy slit for a mouth—and a big old nervous-twitching red forked-tongue. Flicking in & out of her lizard-slit... so that was her fiendish French tickler!!! The one she used to tickle & torture me to death with!!!

It was so scary and disgustingly mind-fucking. And wouldn't you know it? I was right in the middle of starting to have an orgasm. That’s how I ended up with a sprained neck & having to wear a neck-brace. Lueez didn't seem to care... all she wanted was to get her lips on it. Milking that last spastic wad outta me...enjoying me going spaz, shooting my poor brains out, getting off on me whimpering & spraining my poor neck...

It was the last time we had sex... for at least a week. She kept me gagged & handcuffed to the bed posts the rest of the weekend. Keeping me loaded on horrible Martian aphrodisiacs... as she & her coven of E.T. whores & space sluts met in the living room. Discussing what to do with me... now that I knew the awful extraterrestrial secret of their cunt conspiracy to take over Poughkeepsie...

They tuned to their Great Queen Bee... the ancient intergalactic swollen pussy up there in the center of the creamy, cumly Milky Way. The order came down from on high—that I was to be reamed to death inside-out there in the dumpy bedroom of our ratty old trailer in the Zero Trailer Park.

The last thing I remember was... Lueez strapping on her killer Sick Zombie Taser-Gun Vibrating Dildo & fucking me to death. It could've been worse I suppose. I heard they had this terribly painful Splooge Roter-Rooter Dildoe Gun... nefariously called “Zontar the Thing from Venus.”

But I was at Death's Door dontchaknow... my poor Earthboy broken heart had simply had enough. Betrayed by badnews Lizard love... sucked dry by skanky Snake-Oil suction-lips. That's what happens... when you marry a Lizard Chick from Outer Space.... But then I was desperate for Love I suppose. Even Snake love from Outer Space—was better than nothing at all & lonely nights. Kinda? Sorta? Maybe?

Invaders from Mars

Invaders from Mars

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2E7p6-yFQk&feature=related

It’s already happened—the Invasion from Mars.

It happened millions of years ago—way back there a long time ago. The way you look at me—the way you touch me. The fire in your eyes—gives me a fever inside. There’s nothing I can do about it—except feel the rush of Snake déjà vu coming back again through you.

When I hold you naked, perfect—so beautiful. You turn me upside-down—you turn me inside-out. When you fill me up with love—I just cross the line. I can never get enough—baby, it’s always overtime.

There’s nothing I can do about it—there’s nothing more I can say about it. Your lizard love is all I want—your reptile romance is all I need. The way you look at me—the way you touch me.

There’s nothing that seems so true—as just being around you. You’re not just a cute naked ape—you’ve been genetically modified so fine. That snake of yours down between your legs—the streamlined genealogy of your Garden of Eden nice big thing.

I know what it’s like—being exiled East of Eden. Every time I go down on you—it’s my own shameful Fall from Eden all over again. The Tower of Babel comes tumbling down—my babbling tongue can’t get enough of you. No wonder poor Eve went for it—I go for it all the time too. Down she went, my little downfall girl.

Zontar from Venus & the Devil Girl from Mars—had their eyes out for humanity’s swanky downfall. When they sent a guy like you—to fuck around with a queer like me. Bad Seed & Bad Biology right up my alley—I’ve always been a Deformity Lover.

The first time you uncoiled it—pulled it slowly outta your pants. I realized then—the game was up. You were Cain & I was Able. You were gonna slay me—every night from then that’s for sure. Mars Needed Women that's okay—but my queer lips needed it bad too.

You had dark kinky Jurassic Park pubes—and a badboy Martian buzzcut look. You had slinky Saturnian hips—and a skanky Venusian bad attitude. Adam and Eve might have been our stupid monkey-brained parents—but you’re the one that had that big awful Plutonian Prick.

It started off—a long time ago. The perversion of Planet Earth—after the Great Cosmic War. You were part of the Enemy Alien black budget—you were genetically designed to counter-attack Earth evolution.

Snakeoid sex & teen Lizard love—that’s what makes you so serpentine & dumb. So smooth, slick & uncut—down there where a million years moans. Pop goes the Weasel!!!—what more can I say? Especially me...and probably you.

Rooms and Boxes

Joseph Cornell, “The Hotel Eden” (1945)

Juan Gris, “The Table,” (1914)

Rooms and Boxes

“There is a disturbance.”
—Gertrude Stein, “Rooms,”
Tender Buttons

“Juan Gris is not anything but
more than anything. He made
that thing. He made a thing
to be measured.”
—Gertrude Stein, “The Life
and Death of Juan Gris"
_________________

Joseph Cornell’s “boxes”—are like Gertrude Stein’s “rooms.” They both involve a critical cubist arrangement—like Juan Gris’ “The Table.” (1914). They work with existing materials and forms—creating something new from their juxtapositions.

Cornell and Stein were both in many ways—surrealist montage/collage artists. There were no Hollywood special effects—sound, music, dialog, Technicolor, Cinemascope or CGI Blue Screen digital imagery. They both simply used their own visual imagination and objects from their lives—as with “Tender Buttons” and “Rose Hobart.”

Please find following some notes from “Rooms” in Stein’s “Tender Buttons”—I’ve found them to be somewhat relevant to Cornell’s composition method. The edition I’m using is from the Sun & Moon Classic Press (Gertrude Stein Plaza, LA)—along with the Juan Gris collage “The Table” (1914) from the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the cover.

I’m not sure that these zen-like flashes of Stein’s insight—were going through Cornell’s mind when he was working in his basement studio on his readymade surreal boxes. But Stein’s early poem “Boxes” along with “Rooms” in her “Tender Buttons” (1914)—both were written during her involvement with the cubist Juan Gris in Paris.

Stein collected art in Paris—she was interested in Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. But she was especially fond of Gris—who did the lithographs for her “A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story”—even though he was dying. It was published by Kahnweiler’s Galerie Simon at the end of 1926.

The similarities between Stein’s cubist-surreal compositions—and Cornell’s readymade boxes are interesting. A writer interested in cubist art—and a cubist artist interested in writerly composition.

For me both Stein and Cornell were composing “inquiring spaces.” Or rather “inquiring spaces” were creating them—in the sense that it was resulting in a “surprise.”

_________________

Act so that there is no use of center…

A wide action is not a width…

A preparation is given to the ones preparing...

There is no rental…

It was spread there—any change was in the ends of the center…

The shadow is not shining in the way that there is not a black line…

There is a disturbance…

There is a use, they are double…

The author of all that is in there behind the door and that is entering in the morning…

Explaining darkness & expecting relating is all of a piece…

I was the shape that made no audience bigger…

A little lingering lion and a Chinese chair, all the handsome cheese which is stone…

It is difficult to do it one way, there is no place of similar trouble. None. The arrangement is established…

The end of which is that there’s a suggestion, a suggestion that there can be a different whiteness to a wall. This was thought…

A page to a corner means the shame is no greater than the table is longer…

Something that is an erection is that which stands & feeds the silences of a tin which is expanding...

An enclosure blends with the same just is to say there is a blending…

A fact is that when the place was replaced all was left that was stored and all was retained that would not satisfy more than another…

The question is this, is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing…

This question & this perfect denial does make the time change all the time…

The sister was not a mister…

Was this a surprise. It was…

(Was there a surprise? To me it’s like Stein saying: “The sister was not a mister.” An arrangement of objects in the various frames of a Cornell box seems to happen quite spontaneously—and is “automatically” correct.)

The conclusion came when there was no arrangement. All the time that there was a question there was a decision.

(For me there’s a growth of a whole dividing time so that “when formerly there was a mistake there was no mistake now.” For example, before when objects were separated—“there was a waiting.” Then there was a phase of separation that was between “intending and depicting.” It was a time when there was no mixture—the same as if there had been no change.)

Replacing a casual acquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son.

(So that I see each Stein “room” & Cornell “box”—as a kind of brief zen-haiku. A surprise, a startling arrangement that suggests more than just silence. It’s a lesson of consequence. “There is a quiet, there certainly is.” Frequently it’s nothing astonishing. “No eye-glass is rotten, no window is useless.” And yet if there’s no air or life in the box, then there’s only dimness, every bit of it.)

All along the tendency to deplore the absence of more…

So sullen and slow, so much resignation…

(Composing boxes & rooms—as “pleasant state of stupefaction”?)

A box “containing a curtain”…

A package and a filter and even a funnel, all this together makes a scene…

The whole special suddenness commences, there is no delusion…

Why is there a choice of gamboling?

Lying is a conundrum, lying so makes the springs restless, lying so is a reduction, not lying so is arrangeable…

Releasing the oldest auction that is the pleasing some still renewing…

Giving it away, not giving it away, is there any difference. Giving it away. Not giving it away…

The time which showed that was when there was no eclipse…

Why is there a difference between one window and another? Why is there a difference…

A success, a success is alright when there are rooms & no vacancies…

A line in life, a single line and a stairway…

Why is anything vacant, whey is it when it is and why is it whe it isn’t and there is no doubt, there is no doubt that the singularity shows…

The change is mercenary… This is a monster and awkward quite awkward. No change is not needed. That does show design…

Excellent, more excellence is borrowing and slanting very slanting is light and secret and a recitation and emigration…

Certainly shoals are shallow and nonsense more nonsense is sullen…

Dance a clean dream and an extravagance turns up…

Show the plan and make no more mistakes than yesterday.

Surprise, the only surprise has no occasion…