Charles Baudelaire
Even the ideal carries within itself something of the deformities of which it is the exasperated antithesis.
Georges Bataille
Perhaps these two sides of beauty — the beauty of the horrible and terrible and the beauty of purity — make up the Janus-face of Cubism, the seminal style of the twentieth century according to Clement Greenberg. On the one hand Cubism may be defined by Picasso's anti-aesthetic, iconoclastic destruction, and on the other Braque's purification. Or perhaps these two sides are both present in Picasso as the painter of modern life. Baudelaire who authored and embodied the idea of the painter of modern life wrote of a "pure art … the type of beauty peculiar to evil, the beauty of the horrible." This dual purity, this abject-sublime is very much at stake in Picasso — pre- and post-Cubism. Surrendering to and being subsumed into the feminine — that is, via the classical, Apollonian ideal as in Picasso's still life of 1919, Still life with jug and apples; on the other hand, Dionysian, or pagan destruction of the female form as in the 1937 ink drawing, Weeping woman. Dialectically speaking, both forces — of Eros and Thanatos, purity and the horrible, of dread and desire, of the abject and sublime — are present in the 1933 India ink drawing, Minotaur and nude, a drawing fraught with an erotic energy akin to the libidinal energy of Delacroix's 1827 painting The death of Sardanapalus. Both these images are about the desire to control the other, the attempt to ward away the other's destruction of the self. Destruction and purification, tenderness and the desire to belittle both lie at the heart of Picasso's work — it is the root of what is both thematised and literalised in the work as an intense and often destructive desire to re-present, to pro-create. And for Picasso procreation means possession and exorcism — it arises out of both pleasure principle and the death drive. Hence the fact that much of Picasso's oeuvre, underscored by the obsessiveness and explicitness of the later "artist and model" drawings and paintings, is comprised of paintings about painting — that is, the representation of representation as intercourse, as possession, as exorcism. In his words, "Painting, that is actual lovemaking." Here lies the crucial link between the often violent, Dionysian formal irruption on the one hand, and Apollonian purity or restoration on the other.
On the other side of Picasso's Andalusian if ambiguous machismo lies a different kind of rupture. It is the rupture, shock, or trauma of Andy Warhol; "the great idiot savant of our time" as Hal Foster has it. And our postmodern, post-Picasso, or post-machismo time is marked according to Foster by the trauma of the loss of the real, "where one is too early or too late (precisely 'not around', 'not prepared'), but where one is somehow marked by this very missed encounter". Referring to Lacan, Foster notes "As missed, the real cannot be represented; it can only be repeated, indeed it must be repeated". But "repetition in Warhol is not reproduction in the sense of the representation (of a referent) or simulation (of a pure image, a detached signifier). Rather, repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need points to the real, and it is at this point that the real ruptures the screen of repetition. It is a rupture not in the world but in the subject; or rather it is a rupture between perception and consciousness of a subject touched by an image". This traumatic point which shoots out "like an arrow and pierces me", writes Barthes, this rupture, tuché, or punctum is a confusion between subject and world, inside and outside. This is another way of speaking of the dread and desire marking Picasso's destructive-creative, allegorical, and metaphorical play with opposites, with ambiguity. Except that Warhol's ambiguity or dread and desire is marked by a repetition without restoration.
Peet Pienaar and Steven Cohen, two South African artists or art performers, enact, repeat, or re-present Picasso by way of Warhol. They repeat Picasso's destructive-creative drive but problematise the myth of the virile, male genius lurking within it — by way of Andy Warhol's mimetic and melancholic confusion between the inside and outside. That is to say, Picasso's "creative genius", which is utilised both to conquer and expel, is re-presented through Warhol's blank repetition, which both drains something of significance and defends against affect. Picasso projects his destructive-creative drive outward — extending himself through the deconstruction of the female image; Pienaar and Cohen repeat this self-extension but, like Warhol, turn the macho image inward. In one cool, detached, mock performance Pienaar pretends to be a woman, in another he pretends to be a rugby player. In both cases he mocks both transvestites and homophobes — that is, he mocks himself as representation, representation as confusion between the inside and the outside, as that which follows dread and desire. Cohen plays a similar counter-identity game. He fragments himself into fetish, transforms himself into performer, and opens himself up into living art. One might argue that in Tradition he mimes or repeats the Francis Bacon painting After Muybridge — study of the human figure in motion — woman emptying bowl of water and paralytic child on all fours (1965) by giving himself an enema, crawling along a rafter, and douching Elu, a fellow performer — in this way literally embodying and disembodying the complexity of representation qua self-expression or self-voiding. Performances such as Tradition rupture the question of what conventions constitute form or language first; with this rupture complex questions of sex, death, and identity are opened up — of Eros and Thanatos, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the abject and the sublime, of a pure art in relation to a horrible beauty. This is to speak of the drop of poison, the deformity, the excess within every representation, lurking within all ideal form, all language. While they perform or repeat different kinds of excess, what links Pienaar and Cohen is Picasso as the symbol of creativity qua destruction and Warhol as the symbol of the in-significance or in-adequacy of self-expression or expression per se; what links Picasso and Warhol in turn is irony — irony as de-sublimation, as play, as opening up, as restoration, and as warding away.
"Where is Your Rupture?" Warhol asks in a 1960 painting of a newspaper advertisement of a nude female torso. Pienaar and Cohen find their rupture within themselves — that is, within themselves as other, as image, as ready-made, as absence, as language. Other than but bound to or pierced by the ironic-destructive representation of representation at the heart or split of Picasso and Warhol both.
Gerhard Schoeman
Grahamstown, August 2000