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Monday Verses: George Orwell – Romance

Samuel J. Peploe – The Pink Dress. A Study of a Burmese Girl

I am reading a book by the famous Soviet writer and translator, Kornei Chukovsky. Among other things, he translated Walt Whitman into Russian. At some point he amassed all his observations and experience as a translator into a book on the subject, the one I am ploughing through now.

The problems that often haunt translators, especially who try to translate poetry, are those of equivalence and exactitude. On the one hand, we need to translate what is written, i.e. the words. On the other hand, we need to translate what was meant to be said, i.e. the meaning. Between the words and meaning usually sits an image that conveys an emotion – an altogether alien thing, if you dream of any sort of ‘scientific’ method to apply to the translation. As a result, some translators are carried away with the imagery of a poem, while others painstakingly render the words into the target language, with the hope that the reader, should she want so, will figure out the images and their emotional filling by herself.

According to Chukovsky, such should not be the case. A translator must aim at translating both the words and the ‘iconography’ of the poem, its emotional message, as well as meaning. I would also mention Goethe who said that a translator should reach for the un-translatable, in which case a true, accurate translation is at all possible. If we follow Goethe, this would mean that we need to first understand the imagery, emotions and meaning, before venturing to translate the words.

Chukovsky also studies various examples of correct and incorrect literary translations of poems. A great Russian Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont, for instance (whom I love greatly as a poet in his own right), ‘Balmontised” Percy Bysshe Shelly so that Chukovsky jokingly says that the result was a new poet under the name of “Shelmont”. I have noticed in the past, and I guess this may have been his own method, that Balmont often expanded the poems, if they happened to be too short. As a result, Shelly who was sometimes short for words in a very English way became too eloquent and too Symbolist – just like Balmont.

Samuil Marshak, on another hand, would also occasionally be untrue to the exact words of the source poem. His gift, however, was in understanding the symbolic message of the original and the ability to convey it with the literary means of the target language. He was a great poet, after all.

I used his method when recently translating a poem Romance by George Orwell. I’ve been reading a lot of Orwell recently, and this particular poem has been translated a few times into Russian, but I do not think any translation is satisfactory, if only because nearly all of them thwart the Russian words one way too many. The story is very simple: a young soldier falls for a beautiful young girl, and wanting to satisfy himself and be good to her, offers her money in exchange for sex. The girl understands that one day or another a man would “know” her anyway, and since the soldier is asking kindly she raises the bar and instead of “twenty silver pieces” asks for “twenty five”.

This is a heart-rendering story of how Imperialism dehumanises relationships, even the most intimate, romantic and innocent of them. Now, the difference start with the title of the poem. “Romance” was widely translated as “романс”, a kind of Russian song, similar to the French chanson. I’d argue, however, that this not a song; I dare anyone to sing this “song” from the stage. Therefore, it is a romance in the sense of a romantic story, which is correct. None the characters in the poem is against another; the conflict is in the money that cynically underpins the story.

I omitted such “details” as Mandalay, for example; we’re already told that the soldier fell for a “Burmese girl”, and we know that Orwell did serve in Burma, so that will do. The comparisons he draws in the first two lines of the second stanza – “her skin was gold, her hair was jet, her teeth were ivory” – are rather banal (why should not a soldier be banal, anyway?) I reworded the lines as “her skin, and teeth, and jet-black hair are just like treasures”, which is correct, if we consider that gold and ivory were often found in treasure sites. And since the next two lines deal with the ‘sale’ of virginity, i.e. a kind of betrayal, I thought it best to translate “twenty silver pieces” in a way that clearly nods to the thirty silver pieces for which Judas had sold Jesus.

The third stanza is slightly more complex as it gives out so many clues as to what the girl feels: her voice is lisping, virgin, i.e. childish, her look is sad – but she realises that she is offered money for something precious, and she “stands out” for a higher price for this “treasure”. The verb indicates that she does not merely ask for more money, but sort of “pushes” the price. There is no indication if she was prepared to bargain, but this may well have been the case.

George Orwell – Romance (1925)

When I was young and had no sense
In far-off Mandalay
I lost my heart to a Burmese girl
As lovely as the day.

Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,
Her teeth were ivory;
I said, ‘For twenty silver pieces,
Maiden, sleep with me’.

She looked at me, so pure, so sad,
The loveliest thing alive,
And in her lisping, virgin voice
Stood out for twenty-five.

Когда еще я молод был
И сердцем, и умом,
Бирманку юную любил
Я в том краю чужом.

Улыбка, кожа, смоль волос –
Сокровища точь-в-точь.
Я двадцать сребреников дал,
Чтоб провести с ней ночь.

Но грустным детским голоском
Она за первый цвет
Потребовала от меня
Все двадцать пять монет.

Russian translation © Julie Delvaux, 2012

Note on the painting: I used a painting by Samuel John Peploe (1871-1935) as the illustration to this post. I could not find the date he painted the portrait; however, the painting was presented at the Sotheby’s in 2006.

Slavoj Žižek on (Mis)Uses of Violence at the Leeds University

They say that the tickets to Slavoj Žižek ‘s lectures sell out almost as quickly as those to the pop stars’ concerts. The lecture at the University of Leeds on 18th of March was free, and the temptation to go and see and listen to one of the leading philosophers of today was too strong to resist. As a result, I know now that I can arrange an ad hoc trip from Manchester to Leeds (with an overnight stay) in less than half a day.

Thankfully, this knowledge wasn’t the only outcome of my trip to Leeds. I saw Prof Žižek on TV previously, but this was a different experience. It’s been a long while since I attended a proper University lecture, the “full house” one where you have to look for a seat (consider that I came directly from work, with a small suitcase) and where the staff, students and members of the public all sit together, occupying every available space – including the steps. In this sense going to Žižek’s lecture was like getting back to the old times when I was a student. But more than that, it was a wonderful intellectual stimulation. Slavoj Žižek’s current “tour of the North” of England (as aptly described by the “tour manager” Dr Paul A. Taylor, ICS, University of Leeds and Editor of the International Journal of Žižek Studies) serves to introduce his new book, Violence. The reviews of it that you may find on the web (The Independent’s Simon Critchley being perhaps the kindest) criticise Žižek, on the one hand, for calling for no action as the response to the “systemic” violence of the socio-economic order (the counterargument is how can someone be inactive in the face of injustice or war, etc.), and, on the other, for never taking the extra step to act himself. So, as he acknowledged from the start of his talk, this lecture is what he would add to his book, if he were to prepare a new edition.

The three-hour “performance” (and I’m not being ironic) included a short demonstration from the film Žižek!, and I’m embedding three short extracts from the lecture itself. The choice is purely personal, in that I chose the topics that I found most interesting. The first extract is about the problem of explicit and implicit ideological injunctions. Žižek starts by alluding to John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) as the story of how ideology works and of what it takes to liberate oneself from its throes. Liberation hurts, concludes Žižek, and there is hidden agenda underneath every ideological appeal. When he illustrates this with the examples from the Fascist past, it’s hard to disagree. Even when he says that the Catholic appeals to be a priest conceal a promise of paedophile pleasures, one can not only agree, but even bring in a supportive example: The Bad Education (2004) by Pedro Almodovar. It gets more contentious when he argues that behind appeals for humanitarian help there is, in fact, an urge to act without thinking, to contribute money rather than to treat the problem itself. As a result, people become indifferent to humanitarian problems. It is tempting to disagree, but again, I recall Andrew Marr’s deploring in his book My Trade the overflow of sentiments in modern journalism, which makes little more but decrease the tabloid sales. At the same time, the audience grows dispassionate, and – I can add – the phone-in scandals hardly help the matter.

Another extract is about appearances and freedom. The modern relationships between the master and subjects, Žižek claims, are much more oppressive. We simply don’t have the freedom of choice, even though it feels like we’ve never been freer than today. Elsewhere in his lecture Žižek underlined the fact that we’re often left without an alternative. We expect to choose between fundamentalism and liberal democracy, for instance, as if there is no other form of social organisation. I suppose this is what could be called the “unknown knowns” – exactly what Donald Rumsfeld has omitted in his (in)famous speech and to what Prof Žižek alluded a few times. The price for ignoring the “unknown knowns” is usually high, as Žižek didn’t fail to demonstrate. The potential aim of the war in Iraq, apart from freeing the world of Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction, was to create a secular state. The result is that the Iraqi state is now much less secular and more fundamentalist than it was under Hussein: the so-called intelligentsia has fled the country, whereas it is with the help of precisely this social group that the secular state can be built.

In the third extract Žižek speaks of the problem of the Big Other. He is preoccupied with the importance of such notion or object (the “chicken”), especially because it relates to the problem of trauma, as recently discussed by Catherine Malabou in her book The Newly Wounded (Les Nouveaux Blessés). What happens when the Big Other is erased? – is the question Žižek attempts to answer here. Trauma is evidently connected to violence, but he also made a point during his talk that Malabou concentrated too much on the “Western” type of trauma, a momentary trauma, whereas in impoverished deprived African states trauma is literally a state of existence.

Perhaps, many a critique of Žižek’s work could be dismissed by his own statement that, as a philosopher, he isn’t there to help us solve problems or to realise the expectations. His job is actually far more complex: he needs to explain to us whether or not our expectations are sustainable. It is possibly because of this that he prefers to retreat to the back bench. Maybe, instead of supplying us with the facts, he wants us to go and do the job ourselves. The question is not whether Žižek is right; the question is whether we are really ready for this. Already in a 2001 interview (following the 9/11 in America) he stated that there is something wrong with one group of people increasingly “moving” to live in the virtual space while another group of people (which he called “cutters”) maintain that they need to cut themselves in order to feel alive. Seven years later some pundits admit that, in spite of its universally binding force, the Internet (and social media, in particular) leaves you feel extremely lonely – perhaps to the point when you do start cutting your own flesh.

I find one particular thesis very engaging. Žižek repeatedly blazes his critique against the modern multiculturalism, which, in his opinion, is just a new form of racism. Sounds odd, doesn’t it, especially when I’m writing this sitting in a city that prides itself on being diverse and multicultural? But I have only to think of some Mancunians’ attitude to homosexuality. They say there’s nothing wrong about being gay. They say it’s great that a person can be different. They accept and respect homosexuality – as long as they don’t have to visit the Gay Village, to mesh in the Gay Parade, to watch queer films, or to have a gay son or a lesbian daughter. Multiculturalism disguises indifference, which very likely conceals the deeply hidden disgust or fear. On the same note, it’s OK to respect the Hindus, Žižek said in 2001, but does this “respect” extend onto the Hindu custom of a wife burning herself following the husband’s death?

“What is it to be a human?” Žižek asks in his Leeds Lecture, answering: it is perhaps not what we can do, but something that is beyond our reach which we nonetheless are trying to grasp. To be human is to be driven, and indeed, “we endlessly care about things we cannot change”. Furthermore, he states, our innermost narrative (what we tell ourselves about ourselves) is a fundamental lie; we need, in fact, to concentrate on what undermines us. In simple terms, instead of looking at what is familiar to ourselves in ourselves, we should face the “unknown knowns”, things that exist within us but of which we are not immediately aware.

So, the thesis I find extremely interesting is that the true solidarity is not a solidarity in understanding – it is a solidarity in struggle, which manifests itself as the political universality, the only true universality (I guess we may need to retreat to George Orwell once again and his pondering on the political purpose of a writer). “Political”, however, is external, whereas what interests me is the application of Žižek’s thesis to the story of one’s self. I agree with those who say that one must first learn to solve their own problems before they attempt to solve the problems of the others. This is not an advocacy or apology for doing nothing but rather the understanding that the common insight (of which Žižek spoke in 2001) is hardly a matter of divine providence. It has to come from somewhere, and very likely the “somewhere” is within us. Learning to accept one’s personal hidden depths instead of alienating, pitying or victimising oneself in one’s own eyes is for me exactly the lesson of solidarity in struggle. It also exemplifies, powerfully and convincingly, that this struggle never ends, instead it takes on new forms and new dimensions.

The final thesis of Prof Žižek’s lecture that I also found interesting touches on the modern forms of proletarisation. In the modern capitalist world we’re deprived, he argues, of our ecological habitat (because the environment is overpolluted), of our genetic “identity” (through experiments with genome), and even of our intellectual property. The true utopia, however, is that capitalism can extend and reinvent itself forever. A clash is inevitable, but Žižek believes it is possible to do something about it.

Links:

Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

International Journal of Žižek Studies

Žižek! (a film by Astra Taylor)

Details of Prof Žižek’s lecture at the University of Leeds

International Journal of Žižek Studies Facebook group

Slavoj Žižek: “The One Measure of True Love Is: You Can Insult the Other” (@ Spiked-Online)

Violence by Slavoj Žižek

Žižek on Violence (Video) – the video of the Leeds lecture uploaded by Kishore Budha to Subaltern Studies – An Inter-Disciplinary Study of Media and Communications portal.

Reviews:

Simon Critchley, The Independent

Steven Poole, The Guardian

Julian Baggini, The Times

Chris Power, BBC

I’m grateful to Mark Thwaite from ReadySteadyBook for publicising Žižek’s talk.

The Politics of Art (Manchester International Festival, Art and Politics Debate)

As I’m planning to attend MIF’s Arts and Politics Debate at the Town Hall, I’ve been looking for what the visitors to the official website of the festival had to say on the matter. I don’t know what I expected, but the numbers of posts and visitors to each of the forum’s categories are telling.

And then I went to Debates and Discussions section, and there was a selection of questions put up by The Guardian Debates:

  • is religion a force for good in modern times?
  • do art and politics mix?
  • is London bad for Britain?

These are said to be the issues that are to be debated by ‘some of the world’s finest minds‘. I’d especially love to hear their views on the third question, considering how important capital cities are in the development of most of the careers. As far as the first question goes, I’ll gladly quote Mr Tony Blair, ‘I’m certainly not bothered about that‘. Arts and politics is, however, a different subject, and before I go to the debate this afternoon I’ll jot down some of my views here.

Before I do, however, may I say that these generic questions often enrage me. They are usually asked in order to coax the audience into a “debate”, in which any common ground cannot be found by definition. Seriously, how many definitions of art do you know? They say that truth is born of an argument, which is true, providing we know exactly what we’re arguing about.

I had a short-period email correspondence with my compatriot, in which we were talking comfortably about globalisation, Europe, Heidegger, etc. All was fine, until I noticed that he wasn’t actually reading my letters. He was sieving through them, picking up certain phrases out of context, which led to various degrees of misunderstanding. When I finally expressed my concerns, he reproached me: ‘This is the beauty of an argument – soar freely, exchanging ideas, leaving them behind. Disagreements are what I find beautiful, and you don’t‘. I replied that there was nothing beautiful about losing my time.

Let us get back to our sheep. Do art and politics mix? Questions like this force on a thinker a suggestion that art and politics are two completely different, unconnected spheres of life. Whether or not this is possible, each of us can decide for themselves. As far as George Orwell was concerned, one of the four reasons why writers write was ‘political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude‘ (Why I Write).

This must be second or third time I’m quoting this passage from Why I Write in my blog, which should unambiguously suggest where I stand. This blog is not about politics, although I expressed my opinion on certain political issues. However, there’s another reason, why I avoid writing about politics in my blog.

There is today what I would call “the politics of art“, which comprises absolutely everything: from language to the themes of your art. The very fact that political correctness is now fully integrated in the process of making or discussing art manifests that art possesses (or is developing) its own political culture. I personally experienced this during Brokeback Mountain release, when even the most humble critical opinion of the film was decried as a homophobic propaganda. I put the word “film” in bold because the whole BM-gate showed the inability of some faithful followers to distinguish between nasty anti-gay comments and a careful critique of the film as a work of art. The art scene thus came across as even less democratic than politics.

So, art and politics not only mix, they’re always entwined to the extent when you can no longer say exactly what feeds from what, art from politics or politics from art. This occasionally leads to confusion. One such on my memory was calling the monumental architecture and sculpture of the 1930s “totalitarian” because the author analysed it on the examples of Italy, Germany and Soviet Russia, failing to notice the examples of similarly “totalitarian” structures on the other side of the Atlantics. Had this been done, the 1930s monumentalism in art would have had to be placed in the context of industrialisation and the world economic crisis. But objectivity wasn’t the author’s political purpose.

I’ll be writing more on the subject after this afternoon’s debate. Since I don’t see the reason to refute the exchange and connection between politics and art, I think the fundamental question to ask is where the two are heading. How do politics and art see progress and mankind? I’ll wait to see if today’s panellists bring this question up.

Julia on BBC Radio Manchester

Like I said previously, on Thursday I was interviewed by Richard Fair on BBC Radio Manchester. You can now go to BBC Radio Manchester Blog and read the report, just follow this link. Furthermore, you can listen to an extract from my interview – exactly on the point of why I started blogging. And no, it’s not me on that photo.

Yeah, we discussed briefly the reason why bloggers are so *arrogant* in that they expect other people to read what they write. True to my trade, I referred to George Orwell. I only quoted a tiny bit on the radio, but this is the extract from his essay ‘Why I Write’, which I had in mind. Orwell spoke about four motives for writing, and the first one was


Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen – in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

The other three motives for writing, according to Orwell, were aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. The latter I highlighted previously on this blog, in October, in the post ‘What Do You Think an Artist Is?’ As you may note, things have changed since 1946 (as a matter of fact, there’s no Wikipedia entry on Orwell’s essay, so I should probably write that, too), in particular, the interest in money has probably increased among both writers and journalists (at least because we all pay taxes).

The rest of the passage is still true and relevant, although I would rather say that one should distinguish between educated arrogance, informed with your knowledge, experience and self-awareness, and arrogance in the proper sense of the word. I can confidently say that those who know me would never call me ‘arrogant’. They would probably call me ‘self-sufficient’, which some people are willing to pass on as arrogance, but which is not the same thing. In fact, I’d even correct Orwell on this. Writers, who are guided by a political purpose, aesthetic enthusiasm and historical impulse, cannot be arrogant. They are simply dedicated, gifted people, who do sometimes give an impression of not being interested in money and ‘all that jazz’. But they are always interested in other people. Which is why a good writer is always a good historian, and a good historian is always a good writer. In any language, I should note.

We are vain, it’s true, but not because we are hungry for fame. Simply when you are dedicated to something you do, you put enormous efforts into it, and you need to recompense your losses. Which is why the link to my interview is now in ‘Author’s Links’ in the navigation bar.

No matter how vain we are, though, we do not fail to recognise our gratitude to our readers, especially if/when they send comments. And so I am grateful to all my readers, who’s been reading and searching my blog globally, to everyone who’s left comments, and to Robin and Richard at the BBC.

Oh, and I can’t fail to mention this. As you read in my profile, Julie Delvaux is my literary pen name. There is my real name, under which I am fairly well known. Now, there’s a third version – Julia Delvaux. I think, my next step should be realising one of my non-literary dreams and trying myself at music (singing) and cinema. On the one hand, I don’t want my mezzo-soprano to be lost. On the other, with all versions of my name I’m almost ready for an IMDb.com entry.

Isn’t that vanity? ;-))

What Do You Think an Artist Is?

Is pain-inflicting, self-mutilating “art” worthy of such name? Can we not sympathise with another person until we literally wear his shoes and physically experience his sufferings?

Update (29 July 2009):

Almost three years on, this has become one of the most popular posts on Los Cuadernos blog. And in the first half of 2009 I saw one site and one video that presented individuals performing self-mutilating acts for art’s sake. First, a pair of twin brothers exchanged arms: one brother’s arm was cut off from his body and reattached to his twin’s body. Thus one man remained with only one arm, while another ended up with three. And the video below taken from TrendHunter explores artistic self-mutilation further, with ten jaw-dropping examples of what is considered art.

Far from decrying anything you see in the video, I will, however, reiterate the point I made in the original post: why, after all wars and losses, do people still need to “practise” pain and mutilation, as if viewing the images of the dead and disabled people is not enough to understand what pain and death is? Three years on, I think I know the answer.

Humanity is fascinated by Death because, like Love and Pain, this is an eternal secret. It is a mystery. Camus said that suicide is the only true philosophical problem, but since the result of a suicide is death, it means that death itself may be the only true philosophical problem. Philosophy, since its origins, has been preoccupied with making sense of Life and of Man as a living being; but much rarely has it delved into the mystery of Death, and this may be its biggest challenge and hurdle.

It is human therefore that everything morbid fascinates, intrigues, and perplexes us. (Zizek comes to mind: people are forever concerned with what they cannot change). Memento mori. Danse macabre. The theme of Death and the Maiden in art (e.g., Hans Baldung, 1517 (right)). Venus at the Mirror as the parable of the fleeting beauty and deplorable life… the list can be continued, and all it will serve to do is to prove to us how truly interested artists are in what philosophy isn’t so eager to discuss. And in this regard it is probably only normal that there are people who use their own bodies to understand the mystery of pain or the secret of being on the brink of dying. In order to live on, art must be experimental, even if it has to experiment with itself.

Having said so, I’d rather not have this kind of art being performed publicly, let alone covered by the media. With our inclination to build hype around things it would be hard to see the forest for the trees.

Most importantly, I am always somewhat confused when artists, writers in particular, claim that in order to write about something they must know it, experience it first-hand. I’m uttering things, but does that mean that Dostoyevsky would need to kill a couple of old ladies to be able to write Crime and Punishment? And at the same time, speaking of literature, can it not help us gain the life experience that we seek?

It may depend on how we read, of course. Reading is both mental and emotional process. However, what is interesting is that because we most often use words to express ourselves, our entire life is one huge text, and each of us is reading it and making sense of it according to our aptitude and experience. We have to translate this text, either in the language of our experience, or in the foreign language, or in the language of other arts or disciplines.

Can it be therefore that after all the millenia humanity has learnt to do pretty much everything, including the genetic engineering and flying into space, but is still rubbish at such important thing as reading? Reading is understanding. Understanding gives one a key to influence things, to change the world. But what is there at the heart of it? Love, no doubt. For we only care to understand things we care about. And nothing can drive us to care about something as much as Love does. However…

…if we cannot love enough to care to understand, does it not mean that even in our Christian world we have never taken Jesus as an example? Does it not mean that we broke the teaching into citations and took to memorise the words without understanding (sic!) their meaning? It’s been a while since I thought: how odd it is that we are told to love God – but not people. How odd that people love God but distrust their neighbours. Maybe it simply means that people inherently distrust themselves. Maybe it means that they find it easier to trust in the Object that is forever absent and therefore cannot let them down more than it already does, rather than trusting another human being whose money isn’t always where the mouth is. But if Art is born in Love, and the present generation of artists often lacks empathy, does this not explain the rising concerns that contemporary art is devoid of essence?

Original post (2 October, 2006)

Several sayings by Pablo Picasso have already appeared on The LOOK’s front page in the past. I also love this photo of him made by Robert Doisneau. A genuine portrait of the genius.

Another portrait of the genius was made by Jean Dieuzaide, and I’ll leave it for you to guess, whose historic moustache you’re gazing at.


I’ve also found this phrase by Picasso a while ago on the web:

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time, he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

One may say that Picasso’s viewpoint is somewhat outdated, in that people want to live in the world as peaceful as possible, hence art-as-war is no longer interesting. But there are many kinds of war, and not all are fought with tanks and missiles. There are language wars, religious wars, ‘moral’ wars, media wars, and all use art as a type of warfare. Furthermore, as George Orwell has put it, there are four main reasons to write prose, one of which is ‘political purpose‘ – ‘using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certan direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude‘ (Orwell, G., Why I write).

It would be very hard indeed to disagree with either Picasso or Orwell, and there are modern artists who follow in their footsteps. Perhaps, they don’t get involved in politics very much, but they nonetheless admit that their art exists because of people. One such artist is Dave McKean, who put it this way:

My own world is just trying to make sense of the real world. I don’t like the sort of science-fiction art and fantasy art that is just about goblins and fairies and spaceships. I don’t really see the point of that. It’s entertaining and it’s fine, but I couldn’t do it. I needed to be about people, who I have to deal with every day, and that’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in what people think and how they think, and the things that they believe in, and desire, and are frightened of. So I’m interested in that side of life, really. And then I’m trying to sort of look at those things from a different point of view, or from metaphor, or from dreams, or from these other angles, because I think they are just interesting ways of seeing things, you know, that you have to deal with everyday for fresh, and you see them with different eyes, I think. [read full article based on McKean’s interview].
Finally, however, comes this passage from The Wicked and Unfaithful Song of Marcel Duchamp to His Queen by Paul Carroll:

 

Art? A form
of intimate hygiene for
the ghosts we really are.

This brings to my mind a TV programme made by Channel 4, which explored the anti-art, particularly in the form of inflicting pain on oneself as a means of teaching the audience a lesson of empathy. One of my ‘favourite’ moments on the programme was the couple who drank tea with biscuits, while literally “hanging down” from the ceiling on chains, hooks perceing their skin. The idea was to explore their experience of pain and also to expand people’s understanding of pain through such performances.

Having read the entire 120 Days of Sodome by de Sade, I wasn’t scared or repulsed by what I saw on screen, but it made me think. The question I asked myself was this: why in the world where there are so many wars and where the footage of deaths and casualties is already available on the Internet, is it necessary to appeal to people’s empathy by sticking iron hooks in your chest? Far from telling the artists what not to do for their art’s sake, I’m simply wondering about the purpose of such art. If the knowledge of the two World Wars and many other military conflicts doesn’t automatically make people detest the very idea of an offensive war, if the photos of destroyed houses, orphaned children and open wounds don’t change people’s view of loss and pain, then why would seeing two able-bodied adults hanging on chains drinking tea influence people’s idea of pain, or make people more compassionate? I’d imagine that after watching such ‘performance’ people would lose interest in pain altogether. If it’s endurable, then what’s the problem?

Some people with whom I discussed this previously have pointed out that this practice of piercing and inflicting pain is ritual in some countries and cultures. The problem, though, is that the only instance of it on our continent that springs to my mind was flagellantism that had spread in Europe in the 13-14th c. and was later revived as a sexual practice. There is evidently a difference between the culture of piercing in African or Aboriginous societies and this ‘hygienic’ European movement, and as far as I am concerned, this difference is much bigger than someone may think. This ‘civilized’ pain-inflicting art, given its purposes, is – in my opinion – exactly the kind of ‘personal hygiene’ Carroll had written about. An artist, no matter how politically involved, is above all a human being, and when he lacks empathy and cannot relate to other people’s experience, unless he shares it physically, forces to raise questions as to how worthwhile, creative and useful his art is.

And don’t quote Wilde’s ‘all art is quite useless‘. Unknowingly, in this witticism Wilde precluded Sartre who would say that culture doesn’t save or justify anyone – but that it is the mirror in which humanity sees itself. Considering that the Wildean phrase comes from The Portrait of Dorian Gray, culture or art as the mirror symbolically connects Wilde and Sartre. Perhaps it is good if humanity finally notices that it spends more time destructing and inflicting pain instead of learning to love. But will it finally start doing something about it?

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