Oh, Academia, you can pick me up, soothe me with your words
I really didn't know what to say when I was looking at that painting (without sounding like I'm trying too hard or cavalier), or any other painting for that matter. For the want of better words mostly, but I think this is also where the whole lot of logic, signifiers and signification fails. It's almost perverse to codify the body of work into hues, lines, frames, textures..&c, or at least for me, it fractures the reality, (not illusion) of a whole from a distance. And it is always a body rather than a stoic little canvas; a transitive, transparent, trans-gendered space of many things and/or nothing at the same time. I could only stand in front of the massive wall, and embrace my lack of (proper) response and expression with such hallowed piety.
Or it could just have been the lights that made it seem so.
I came to the realization that it was not possible to say (exactly) what I had fallen for, but what I felt upon being pulled into a two-dimensional parallel that made me appreciate it so. It only takes that much people in that much space to saturate the air with sweat, wine and unnaturally high laughter that made me all the more conscious of this corporeal frame that hung dryly on the shoulders of my soul, and then I literally walked into a wall. This wall I speak with reference to Nigel's piece "These Women I Would Never Sleep With". I am appalled, amazed and amused all at the same time, without being able to say why and maybe it is better that I do not know the technicalities of form or even attempt to try. In Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, Alex says "It's funny how the colours of the real world become really real when you viddy (*see) them on the screen." So too does the body become strangely familiar and all the more material in contact with this opaque mirror. I didn't stare for too long, maybe because it was my being pushed around by the senseless traffic who wanted more wine and photographs, or the growing sense (and perhaps dread also) of a displacement of the body, my body, as I knew it.
I admire the sanctity of her body because it is ugly, because it is human. It is non-symmetrical, therefore all the more earnest. I refuse to think about my own, because I am afraid but I imagine all bodies to be essentially the same (especially under exposure) as foreign and arcane, but to set my eyes on her as she half-watched back helplessly, was such a peculiar but non-immoral violation. I saw a representation of reality or the reality of a representation, of three-dimensional people on three-dimensional stock chairs exposing a queer three-dimensional nakedness.
It was logic and rationality that I was resisting against, against the temptation to reduce the body, or bodies into swathes of colour regardless of how methodical it may have seemed. "The murder of the image consists in reintegrating it in every possible way into the realist order, into the logic of representation." (Baudrillard, 65) I feel there is still some logic behind representation, maybe not as a systemic organ of expression but a tacit, metacognitive agreement that truly, truly captures something special without destroying it altogether. I looked around me, and there are other bodies breathing, other bodies on the wall, other bodies smelling like wine, and all of it representations, a camera obscura. Each of these too, have a singularity of their own, a beauty and a perfection, a difference in repetition.
And yet I could not escape entirely when asked, but with an unsteady shuffle of my feet, managed a meek (but honest) "It's lovely."
I still picture the unnaturally ochre, lithe frame in my head from time to time, and it is a disturbing but comforting intrusion. Anyway, the light of day has long ebbed and I still could not (would not) start on my ten-page film essay, although I think there is now some semblance of a beginning somewhere in this pseudo-dialectics. So in the spirit of such (faux) ambition, Ad astra per aspera. Goodnight world.