Editorial Article
"On
the day on which he [a man] becomes proof against pleasure he also becomes
proof against pain […], those most untrustworthy and passionate of masters. We must,
therefore, escape from them into freedom. This nothing will bestow upon us save
contempt of Fortune: but if we attain to this, then there will dawn upon us
those invaluable blessings, the repose of a mind that is at rest in a safe
haven". (L. Annaeus Seneca, Of a Happy Life).[1]
The issue of human sensuality and its complexities
stand at the center of the current issue of the E-Journal History and
Theory: the Protocols.
In
difference to 'sensuous', which refers to physical experience in general, the
term 'sensuality' refers to the sensory experience that is defined as bodily
pleasure, and particularly to that which refers to the naked body. The dual
separation between the "metaphysical" senses of hearing and sight,
and the "physical" ones of touch, smell and taste, already evolved in
Socrates' thinking, and particularly in his distinction between the 'beautiful'
– sensed through hearing and sight, and the 'pleasurable' – sensed through the
other senses, and especially through those pertaining to sexual pleasure,
which, albeit it pleasantness, is certainly not beautiful. This dualism was
fortified in the long period of Christian moral ascendency in western culture,
and was especially manifest in the theological separation between the worldly
and the heavenly which posited the body as a containing but antinomic element
relative to the immortal soul, by which sensous pleasure was conceptually
separated from the sensual pleasure that was associated with the mortal flesh.
Yet, albeit the strong tendency to
conceptually and morally separate the two, the sensual human body has enjoyed a
considerable representation in all areas of culture throughout history – both
in the western tradition, and in world history in general – and was and remains
the subject of many multifaceted discourses which indicate the de facto
inseparability of the human body, sensuality and the sensuous.
The
conjunction of the sensuous, sensual and spiritual arises clearly from
Christian Marclay's 24 hour long video art piece "The Clock"
from 2010 that was recently bought by the
The
ticking of the clock, which emphasizes time's languishing crawl, also
foregrounds our own perishability, and thus ties the physical-sensory body with
the human spirit – perpetually a captive of time, which it itself defines and
in effect forms. This experience manifests the ancient dictum "memento
mori" (remember death) by forcing upon the viewer the magnitude of his own
finite being, leaving the viewer with either Zadie Smith's conclusion (in
discussing Marclay's work) that "Time is not on our side. Every minute
more of it means one minute less of us [….] We are tied to the wagon and it’s
going in only one direction, whether we like it or not", or with Seneca's
age old insight "Let us bear with magnanimity whatever the system of the
universe makes it needful for us to bear: we are all bound by this oath:
"To bear the ills of mortal life, and to submit with a good grace to what
we cannot avoid.""[2]
Yet, precisely through this emphasis
on men's transitory nature and experience, is Marclay's Clock able to
combine the sensual and sensuous with the spiritual in a manner that
refortifies the bonds between the body and the mind, the physical and the
metaphysical. This statement about the inseparability of experience and being
relays on the artist's masterful use of sound which highlights the interfaces
and points of conjunction between the multiplicity of films from which the work
was interwove, and thus endows the work's statement with universality that at
the same time reminds one of Qoheleth's renowned statement: "What has been
will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new
under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
The cinematic manipulations of the
viewer's senses using a combination of visual and audial expressions, stand at
the center of Aner Preminger's article – "Charlie Chaplin Sings a Silent
Requiem: Chaplin's Cinema in the Period 1928-1952 as a Cinematic Statement on
the Transition From Silent Films to Talking Films" – that opens this
issue. In this article, Preminger criticizes the common view according to
Chaplin is associated almost exclusively with the silent film era, by analyzing
the relation of sound to picture in his films, thereby exposing their
innovation and contribution to the formation of talking cinematic expression.
The next five articles focus on the
tension between the sensuous and the sensual in the works of several
contemporary artists. Efrat Biberman's article – "On Friendship and
Beauty: A Broken Phone Between Deganit Berest and Virginia Woolf" –
centers on the sensual and erotic aspects of some of Deganit Berest's works in
a critical discussion that elaborates on the interfaces and differences between
the concepts of friendship and eroticism. This form of analysis is used in a contrasting
fashion in Mati Meyer article "On Sense and Sensibility in the Work of
Talia Tokatly", in which Meyer discusses several of Tokatly's clay works,
including a bodiless underwear, repulsive prostitutes, transsexual dogs and
hardened clay pillows, which together manifest Tokatly's attempt to break out
of the boundaries of her born, feminine identity and dissociate from
"normative" gender categorization.
The connection of raw materials and
gender identity also arises from Dalia Bachar's article, "Nobody’s Sweetheart!
– Chocolate and the Feminine Body", and from David Sperber's article,
"The Abject: The Menstruant, Impurity and Purity in Feminist-Jewish
Art", both of which highlight the role of sculpted materials. Bachar
discusses the subversive works of three feminist artists – Hannah Wilke, Janina
Antoni and Karen Finley – which seek to undermine the connection between
chocolate (a 'lick-able' and sensual candy), and the objectified feminine body
(sensual, sexual and available), that is established in popular-consumer
culture. Sperber, in turn, focuses on the use of menstrual blood by
contemporary Jewish women artists, with a comparative discussion that relates
religious present day art with the art of abjection that was made by feminist
artists in the 1970-80s through the prism of the Jewish laws (Halachas) that
deal with "Nidda" (menstrual exclusion).
In difference to these two articles,
Michal Popowsky's article "On Body Modification and the Concept of
Sexuation: Orlan's New Face Construct", examines the body itself
as a raw material that undergoes modification and reconstruction with a
critical discussion of the pleasure that arises from self-remolding as this
manifests in the sexuation process of Orlan's works. Finally, closing the first
division, is Roni Amir's article "The Sphinx: From a Gatekeeper to a Femme
Fatale" that focuses on the issue of gender transformation historically,
with an examination of the far reaching transformations the enigmatic figure of
the sphinx underwent throughout history – changing from male to female, and
from a threating female that represents the riddle, to an embodiment of the
riddle itself.
The next five articles deal with
feminine sexuality relative to the issue of pornography. Hagai Dagan's article
"The Divine Vagina: Theological Thoughts About Pornography",
discusses the phenomenological relation between religious elements and female
sexuality that combines worship and veneration with hostility and fear. This
duality, argues Dagan, is amplified in pornography, which seeks to reinforce
the patriarchal Judeo-Christian taboos in order to repeatedly derive excitement
from their violation. Following Dagan's discussion are two articles that deal
with the relation between literature and pornography, and literary pornography:
Nurit Bucjweitz's "Pornography and the Post-Human in Michel Houellebecq's
Novels", in which the author analyzes the relation between pornography and
Houellebecq's realistic writing, thus gauging its role in his novels' meaning
production; and Lily Glasner's "On a Horse, a Donkey and a Woman, or: a
Subversive Message in a Pornographic Ploy in Decameron", in which the
author discusses one of Boccaccio's pornographic ploys, and exposes a layer of
subversive social messages that is embedded within the lewd story, thereby
undermining the meaning of the plainly visible narrative.
The social complexity of
pornographic imagery is picked up, from a different perspective, in Polina
Shtemler's article "Love Hurts: The Masochistic Carnival in Medieval
Courtly Art" that focuses on images depicting domineering, violently
abusive women, who control men through 'anguishing love'; and in Ilan
Abecassis' article "Erotic Plates from the Ancient Babylonian Period
Manipur". While basing herself on contemporary discourses concerning the
BDSM culture, Shtemler argues that these images are not expressions of
misogyny, as they appear at first sight, but are rather expressions of a
subconscious transfer of control, which serves as an outlet, and thus in effect
upholds the accepted gender norms. Abecassis, in turn, questions the academic
conventions regarding ritual prostitution, by arguing that several famous
plates were in fact intended as a means to protect women's orifices, through
which demons may enter the body.
Concluding this issue are two
theoretical articles that discuss the issues of sensuality and sensuousness
relative to the experience of art. In her article "Beyond Uncanny Anxiety:
Uncanny Compassion, Uncanny Awe and Matrixial Border-Linking in Experiencing
Beauty and the Sublime", Bracha L. Ettinger discusses the unconscious
aesthetic result of the uncanny that manifest in awe and compassion, when these
are seen as primal emotional affects that relate to gender differentiation. By
expending the Freudian notion of the uncanny anxiety, Ettinger illustrates new
connections between uncanny compassion and the beautiful, and between uncanny
awe and the sublime, while discussing the beguiling capacity of art, which
expends the capacity of the human spirit to carry the sorrows and joys of the
world while discovering-creating-knowing itself. The power of art also serves
as a central theme in the article that closes this issue – Yael Ben-Simon's
"The State of Installation: A Critical Reading in the History of
Installation Art Following Heidegger and Benjamin". In this article
Ben-Simon discusses two seminal themes by Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin:
the anesthetization of the political and the politization of the aesthetic,
through which she analyzes the field of installation art, and the
ethical-aesthetical relations it embodies.
Closing the issue are
two virtual exhibitions, which, like Marclay's Clock, testify to the
complex connections between the spiritual, sensual, sensuous and death. Tamir
Lahav-Radlmesser's works focus on the male body by situating it as naked,
vulnerable and stripped of passionate anesthetization in front of the viewer's
sight. Stripped of its power, the naked body amplifies the connections between
sensuous being and death; between passion and a horror that arises from the
painful non-being that accompanies man like a shadow. This dealing with pain is
also present in Tamar Nissim's works, which focus on the female form through
the artist's own figure, as it appears in multiple performances that focus on
compulsion, obsession and abjection.
[1]L. Annaeus Seneca, Minor Dialogs Together with the
Dialog "On Clemency": Of a Happy Life,
[2]Excerpts taken from: Zadie Smith, Killing
Orson Welles at Midnight, The New York Review of Books, April 28 2011,
accessed 15 September 2011, at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/28/killing-orson-welles-midnight/?page=2,
and from: L. Annaeus Seneca, Minor Dialogs Together with the Dialog "On
Clemency": Of a Happy Life, London: George Bell and Sons, 1900, chapter XV