the beautiful and the ugly
the beautiful and the ugly, in Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty
“For a man, there is nothing more depressing than the ugliness of a woman,” so writes the aptly titled “metaphysician of evil”, Georges Bataille.
Bataille suggests the bleakness of ugliness; its lack of any opportunity for sacrifice, or occasion to pollute. Beauty, on the other hand, is abundant. Beauty gives rise to desire for the very reason that it may be befouled; that there is space to destroy it, and subsequently, great pleasure “…in the certainty of profaning it.”
When we witness the soporific, necrophilic fantasy that is, Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty, it seems that Bataille may not have been far from truth, in his suggestion that the domain of eroticism is primarily one of violence and violation.
A work of great force and originality, writer/director Leigh’s debut film, was for me, first and foremost, a mediation on the beautiful and the ugly, the power that comes with the ripeness of youth, and the inexplicable link between sex and mortality. Inspired by the novellas of Yasunari Kawabata and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well as Leigh’s own struggles with recurrent nightmares, the result is a twisted fable that leaves you a little bit breathless.
We first encounter the insolent Lucy, (Emily Browning), in a science lab, as a researcher feeds a tube into her mouth and down her oesophagus. The setting is austere, and the experience both uncomfortable in its reality, and equally unpalatable as a (painfully drawn-out) cinematic moment.
A detached, yet intelligent young woman, whose behavior is more often than not, nonsensical, Lucy juggles University with several jobs; in a cafe, in an office, in a science lab; also occasionally prostituting herself to some unsavory suits at a local bar.
Leaving one form of degradation for another, she goes on to answer an ad, which sees her working in an exclusive and very private house, where older men are entertained and served by young women.
Once there, she is “promoted,” and drugged by Clara, (Rachel Blake) and willingly partakes in a form of paraphilia known as ‘Sleeping Beauty Syndrome,’ which requires its object to be completely unconscious, on the condition that no penetration takes place.
“You will go to sleep; you will wake up. It will be as if those hours never existed.”
The lovely young body of Lucy, almost luminous in its whiteness, coupled with the opulent interiors of the estate, call to mind a sort of Orientalist indulgence. The voyeurism of Ingres, or the reclining Odalisque in Manet.
The unscarred purity of her flesh is juxtaposed directly against the aging, clumsy bodies of much older, impotent men who make various futile attempts to will themselves to an erection whilst she sleeps.
Although the camera treats these intimate encounters between youth and old age sympathetically, it was difficult to deny the discomfort I experienced when witnessing the two in such close proximity.
In one of the most memorable scenes, Man One, (Peter Carroll), delivers a soliloquy to camera. His words dabble in the fragility of aging, on what it means to die without experiencing the beauty of the flesh. There is a sense here that the young female body, titillating and divine, is equally unknowable. Although imprisoned in these secret chambers, an offering to be enjoyed and destroyed, the body is also itself the locus of the secret; simultaneously desired, and forbidden territory.
The objectification and violation of Sleeping Beauty is treated with a sort of stoic detachment, inviting us into the fable, only to keep us always at arms length. Leigh seems to reference the sadomasochistic Salo, but never really goes that far.
I was quite disturbed by this film, the very idea that such violation could ever occur. Perhaps what moved me the most though, was Lucy’s fixation on her lost hours; the parallels drawn to the lost hours of growing old and the fear that comes with the certainty of entering the longest blink of all.
For Marie Curie
In 1929, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem about the great Marie Curie, proclaiming the dichotomy of her existence. Rich writes of a body that was slowly being bombarded by the very element she had purified. She reflects on Curie’s resolute denial of her wounds, “the cataracts on her eyes,” the frightening truth, that the cause for her steady demise was born in the same source as her power.
Eighty years on, in a classroom, in a university, in a capital city, in a Western, First World country, in the 21st century, at a moment when freedom of speech and information are as given as our right to breathe, a female lecturer stood in front of a first year Philosophy class composed mostly of females, and spoke of her belief, that the smarter the woman, the more difficult her life would be.
As if forewarning that our knowledge, our power, could be double-edged, in the six years of my university education, for better or worse, this would be a quote that stuck. Every girl in the room that day would carry around the weight of those words forever; until they were lucky enough to forget them, or strong enough to deny them.
Did Curie know that those viles of radioactive isotopes she carried in her pockets and stored in her desk drawer, were both poison and medicine?
Productive in their cure, active in their destruction, seductive in their magical blue- green glow; discoveries that had seen her claim the Nobel Prize twice, elements she had named; ushering her ending.
Learning; information, with all of its allure, its promise of power and satisfaction, would open us up in the classroom that day, and in classrooms everywhere, to a new world. So too would it expose us to something almost radioactive in its power; an insatiable hunger, to always, always, know more. To fear a static mind.
A life of understanding, analyzing, comparing, associating, gives rise to endless opportunities and with it, a denial so similar to Curie’s, that this knowledge could ever be damaging, that this knowledge, like power, could ever be unproductive.
So too do we begin to deny a place for ourselves in the ordinary. Having read on love, on sexuality, on the mind, on the order of things, having known of 41 women before us who’ve won the nobel prize, we, young women, will go on to aspire, and be. We will never accept the runner up to something we rightly know exists, because, well, we’ve read it. And history doesn’t lie.
We will lose friends, lovers, acquaintances along the way because they may not be able to keep up with our dreams. We will lose some of them simply because they failed to inspire us any more than we could inspire ourselves.
Some, bitten by a desire to succeed and surpass will inevitably fail. Some will go on to greatness, and all will die denying that those who fed us knowledge were the ones who made us fear it.
My friends are all made of stars
ASHLEY
I met Ashley when I was 13. She was cool. I wasn’t. She did things like smoke in the toilets, smoke at the train station and smoke at parties on the weekend. It was almost insane how much she smoked. She had long, glossy hair and eyebrows with their own personality. Her school uniform was always shorter than mine. Actually, that was the weirdest thing, because I was at least a foot taller.
I can’t remember the exact moment, because the exact moment doesn’t matter, but something happened and we were friends forever. We soon came to be fondly known as “lank and midge,” which isn’t anywhere near as endearing as once presumed now that I think about it. We made each other laugh, and we kissed anyone who would have us. When no-one would have us, we just kissed each other. When I thought my vagina was weird she felt it at a party in a toilet and told me that the little soft bead was my clitoris and that I shouldn’t worry. That it was totally a good thing. When I was the right age, I lost my virginity to someone while Ashley slept beside me where she had passed out in a drunken coma the night before. On my 21st birthday, she told me she wasn’t passed out at all.
What I like most about Ashley is that she is always the one who makes the most truthful observations in rooms so often full of bullshit. It’s this almost innocence that I’ll love forever.
Like all good friendships, we’ve lost each other briefly, and always found our way back. We share secrets and I will carry her always, just like she carried my handbag when I felt like I couldn’t throw shapes properly because it was limiting my movement.We all need a Plan B.
Harold Camping was convinced that on the 21st of May 2011, the world was going to end. There would be a series of devastating earthquakes heralding the ‘Rapture,’ when faithful Christians would ascend to heaven before the second coming of Christ. Seemingly digressing from what I’ve always assumed to be the very foundation of Christianity, that plan B is, in fact, the afterlife, Camping demonstrated a resolute belief in the absolute when he said, “There is no plan B.” When the sun rose on the 22nd of May, as it always does, and always will, The Rapture of 2011 was runner-up to that time when Cee Lo sung with Gwyneth and the Muppets as the greatest ‘shit the bed’ of the year. Camping later said that he got it wrong, and the Rapture will now be rescheduled to October 21st. Just when we start thinking, “who gave this man a microphone” we do a little research and come to see that Camping actually began his career on radio. It was the great radio hoax of 1938, The War of The Worlds that convulsed Americans into panic and hysteria as they believed that simulated news reports of invading martians were true. Speaking of invading martians, the brainwashed and the irate, Mel Gibson as the minister who has lost all faith in M. Night Shamalyan’s 2002 film Signs, made us wish that Mel Gibson didn’t have any public persona outside of his cinematic appearances. Or at least, that Mel Gibson didn’t speak whilst intoxicated. Signs also starred Joaquin Phoenix, the recovering alcoholic and quiet, hair-lipped genius who managed to convince not only the ‘believe everything’ US, but also the rest of the world, that he was a genuine weirdo who had quit film and taken on a career in rap. That dirty little prankster. Original prankster was the name of a song by The Offspring. The first offspring of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin was tormentingly named ‘Apple’. It was the apple, the forbidden fruit that fell from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that tempted Adam and Eve to Original Sin, and eventually led to the Fall of Man. Original Sin is the name of a song by INXS. INXS frontman, Michael Hutchence died through auto- erotic asphyxiation. Auto- erotic asphyxiation is the intentional restriction of oxygen to the brain for the business of sexual arousal and ecstasy. In moments of extreme ecstasy, borders between life and death, pleasure and pain are often blurred. The fluidity of borders is addressed by Julia Kristeva in her definition of the abject, to the conclusion that whilst we fear that which we cannot easily categorise, we must simultaneously embrace it, as it is completely necessary to defining the self. “I lost myself on a cool damp night, gave myself in that misty light, was hypnotized by a strange delight, under a lilac tree…” were lyrics penned by the late Jeff Buckley. In the Victorian language of flowers, lilac symbolises the first emotions of love, probably the greatest ecstasy we could ever know. Also pertaining to ecstasy, is the word “rapture”, a feeling so strong, that one is transported to another place. Even heaven. Come October 21st, let’s hope that there is a heaven, or at least a solid plan B.
Eric
My grandmother collapsed on our staircase. Her body rousing with grief. Hopeless, endless grief. Tears that she couldn’t breathe through. Crying, that rattled the bones of our house. Humming that I still hear. In her pink dressing gown, pilled by the years, she looked smaller than she’d ever seemed. She looked like a child. That night, death swarmed around us. We lost my Grandfather, and for every day that would follow, we missed him. It haunts me still, that as he lay dying, we were only sleeping. My mum says she sees him in her dreams where he walks toward her, spritely and unaided. Always smiling. I’ve never been that lucky. For some of us, death brings thoughts of human mortality closer. We dwell in the fragility of life. That we may love somebody, with everything we have, so completely, knowing all the while, that they could so easily be taken from us. Perhaps though, we should consider that people we love come and go, exactly when they need to. My Grandfather made us laugh, taught us how to make miraculous things out of wood and nails, planted the seed for our eternal love of Moon River, farted with great pride, and raised my Mother to be the closest anyone could ever come to perfection. He watched us grow up, and we watched him grow old. We noticed as my Grandmother became his carer, as it wore away at her. The way she had been shuttled too quickly through old age. When he left us, he left little gaps. An empty chair at the kitchen table, an empty moment of silence. Half of a bed, a couch, a life, an early memory best told by two. These days though, we laugh. We laugh at the politically incorrect things he said, his love of toilet humour, and the way the morphine had convinced him that people were parachuting out of his hospital window. I always remember sitting on his lap when I was little, listening to a story I had heard hundreds of times before. Listening with the same zeal as when I had heard it for the first time. He loved that. And I would be there, perched on his lap knowing well, that when I looked away, he would surprise me by squeezing the muscle above my knee. It made me squeal and laugh uncontrollably. It’s an exquisite sensation; almost addictive, that I couldn’t help but want to experience time and time again. It’s at a place that’s impossible to pinpoint on your own, and a feeling that I’ve always struggled to explain. The closest I’ve come to it, is when I picture him. There’ll be a trigger, and the thought of my Grandpa will surface. Brief, divine, and painful all at once. And then it’s gone again.
Snow.
In October 2010, I had my heart broken. I remember the words, the weather outside, what I was wearing (his t-shirt) and the way it made me feel (empty). I remember that he couldn’t look at me, when his voice cracked in the middle as he said he didn’t love me anymore. I remember our fight the night before, coming home to him passed-out cold, in some weed and booze induced coma. I remember smoking a cigarette in tears ( a terrible idea), blowing smoke in his face to wake him (also not intelligent), the soundtrack of Cat Power (the worst cliche), slipping into bed behind him; smelling his hair, his skin, touching his back, and knowing that this would be the last time I would be doing that. I remember the way he looked at me when he walked me to my car; a mix of sadness and desperation and, it’s done.
I remember walking past a man wearing the same cologne as he had. I remember thinking that it stunk like shit.
In time, these memories will grow murky and recede into the great scheme of things. But that day, and for days after, I endured nothing less, than a little death.
Two months on, I saw snow for the first time in my life. Both experiences left me feeling that I could never be warm again.
In one of the coldest European Winters on record, there I was, relishing in deep, selfish melancholy, looking out onto white endlessness from the window of the Eurostar. Here I discoveredthe intense silence of snow. Nothing is as lonely, as absolute, I thought.There is rarely any other time, when the entire world would seem to be constituted of one thing, and one thing only.
As a consequence of this harsh Winter, I became more introspective than ever. I dwelled. Everything I looked at took on a greater significance. I cried in front of The Kiss by Klimt. I cried into my fourth mulled wine and decided that from here onwards, I would despise cinnamon. In my head I became a little twisted; vaguelyinsane. Everywhere I looked, every time I felt like I couldn’t get warm, I thought of him. That cunt who had broken me.
Just as cold creeps into your bones, rattles you, hurts you, and leaves you a little numb to touch; so too, does a broken heart feel unshakable. It colours your world and swallows you. So we run, we seek distraction, another way to feel warm, in any way we can find it. In a book, in a song, in friends, by a fireplace, in heavy drinking. (Spirits work well.)
Eventually, we begin to feel as if we’re growing immune to the cold; it becomes something we can deal with a little better each time we face it.
If only the same could be said of a broken heart.
Just like all the other dreamers and idiots, I realised, soon enough, that there is nothing inherent in traveling that will miraculously heal you or rid you of everything you left behind. Visas expire, but emotional baggage does not. I would, like all the dreamers and idiots before me, return home, fatter and more cynical than how I had left.
Margaret Atwood once wrote that “The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.” For me, trying to write on love and everything that comes with it, is to be confronted with the immense failure of language. It’s always too much, or too little. Excessive and impoverished, all at once. It’s never enough.
For fear of the story of my broken heart being too full, too empty, too dramatic or too pale, in that Winter, I found a new way to describe it. I could assign it to a Season; something a little more permanent, a little more unchangeable than language. I could defy Shakespeare and all the other great romantic storytellers, and instead, compare thee to a Winter’s day. Afterall, in the end, everyone stops feeling like Summer.
Just as our tolerance of the elements grows; as we lug the immeasurable weight of a broken heart around, it begins to feel a little lighter. We go on living because it’s what we humans do best. And it’s all that we know.
We need the cold. Without it we would never realise the beauty in heat. Without heartbreak we would never see love in colour. Broken and stitched up, what we’re left with, is the gift of truly knowing love when we see it; warmth when we feel it, all because we’ve lived through the darkness of Winter.
Dedicated to my Grandma, my hero, whose seen 82 Winters and still complains about them every single time.
A look at Homer’s Odyssey as an ode to waiting…
Am I in love? —yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
-Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse 1978
In 1978, Roland Barthes wrote A Lover’s Discourse. A list of fragments; gestures, of the lover at work. Barthes preferred to call them “figures,” all of which pertained in some way, to the discourse of love.
Waiting, is one such example.
Barthes speaks of “Waiting” as the, “Tumult of anxiety provoked by waiting for the loved being, subject to trivial delays…Waiting is an enchantment: I have received orders not to move. Waiting for a telephone call is thereby woven out of tiny, unavowable interdictions to infinity: I forbid myself to leave the room, to go to the toilet, even to telephone (to keep the line from being busy).” A true master of weaving together all that we thought we knew, Barthes breaks down our experiences and turns the mirror upon us.
Waiting, as a tensile point in time, is ultimately a path toward stasis. One cannot move forward so long as one is fixed by the gravity of the compulsion to wait.
Composed around the end of the 8th century BC, long before the time of telephones, is Homer’s epic tale of The Odyssey; the ultimate, ode to waiting.
On it’s most obvious level, The Odyssey describes the journey of Odysseus, who is away from his wife Penelope, and son Telemachus, for 20 years after the Trojan War. During this time, all the while remaining faithful, and keeping her 50 suitors at bay, his wife Penelope waits.
These 20 years of waiting, marked by a loss of faith, of mourning for her husband, leave Penelope in a state of inertia. She is at a loss.
Evidently, in Greek Mythology, waiting and loss, are actually, inextricably linked. If the process of waiting implies either never having possessed something, or awaiting the return of something else; then one is at a loss for the duration of their waiting, they are missing something; someone.
As with several other female entities in Greek myth, Homer’s Penelope represents the complexities of the experience of woman. She is both an embodiment of submission, the “weeping”, “waiting”, “discreet”, “observant” Penelope, and yet, a cunning spirit; “alert Penelope”, the one who deceives the suitors blind. She is simultaneously the one who waits, and the one who invokes waiting in others.
If the poem of The Odyssey is furthermore an exercise in the great solitude that comes with waiting, then it is through Penelope that this is illuminated. This resonates with Barthes, particularly if we turn to the words which begin the introduction for A Lover’s Discourse. He writes, “The necessity for this book is to be found in the following consideration: that the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude.”
Perhaps not much has changed in over 2700 years, from Homer to Barthes and beyond. Missing Odysseus, Penelope is left in a state of extreme solitude. Homer describes her almost disappearing into the depths of grief for her husband; “Icarius’s daughter Penelope, wary and reserved…that radiant woman… suddenly, dissolving in tears.” In her process of longing and of grief, Penelope recedes into herself, like a sea at low tide.
Yet, in the plight of Penelope, in her retreat inward to herself, she possesses great power. She guards the precious household stores. She tests her husband before she accepts him, and ultimately, his love and confidence are her reward. By the close of the epic, it is assumed that Penelope must be, “…the conspicious prototype of the faithful and long-suffering wife.” Yet she is much more complicated than that. The one who is left behind, the one who waits for twenty years, the one who has the capacity to move forward, but chooses to hold onto hope and love. There has got to be some heroism in that.
The one who leaves for the journey risks plenty, but it is often the one who stays behind who risks more. Penelope risks innertia, immesurable loneliness, endless solitude.
This, The Odyssey, is Odysseus’s story, of his bravery and his courage. Yet I pose that these heroic qualities be equally attributed to Penelope.
The one who waited.
If there were two photos from my trip that could ever speak volumes of our experiences then these would be it. The eerie quiet of never-ending snow, and the sounds of warmth and embrace; laughter, love, and that first splash of wine hitting the bottom of the glass.
Maurizio Catellan. Rupturing the Symbolic order.
The female body as spatial
In many of the fictions of the Marquis De Sade, there are rooms and antechambers to which we do not have access; spaces in which predominantly women, are both enjoyed and destroyed. For Sigmund Freud, rooms are themselves feminine spaces, noting that the polite German expression, “Frauenzimmer”, used to denote woman, or rather, lady; literally translates to “woman’s room”. In the symbolic geography of sex mapped out in the dreams of Freud’s notorious case study of Dora, a box, a receptacle, a hollow space, is naturally feminine. Thus, from a Freudian perspective, one might say that the spatial and the feminine are already conceptually and geographically linked. The female body, in art and in society, has long been imprisoned within secret spaces, but this body is also itself the locus of the secret; both desired, and essentially, forbidden territory. The woman’s genitals are both obviously spatial and a “place,” representing paradoxically both “home” and a “no-man’s land” according to Freud, whose very character, is absence.
In his 1919 paper, Freud describes “the uncanny” as “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of, old and long familiar,” and “which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” In this essay, Freud demonstrated that the unexpected equation of the apparent contraries, heimlich (homely, familiar) and, its negation, unheimlich (the uncanny) in the German language, provided an instrument whereby he could penetrate the meaning of unusual literary texts.
What from the perspective of the one who is “at home” is familiar, is to the outsider, the stranger, the very definition of the unfamiliar. The term heimlich thus embodies the dialectic of “privacy” and “intimacy” that is inherent in bourgeois ideology. Therefore Freud can associate it with the “private parts,” the parts of the body that are the most “intimate” and that are simultaneously those parts subject to the most concealment. In freud’s thesis, the ‘unheimlich, the uncanny’ is a revelation of what is private and concealed, of what is hidden, hidden not only from others, but also from the self.
The uncanny we might say, begins in the home, and so does, as history tell us, the female body. The image of the feminine, has more often than not, been aligned with the house and the home, as both a site of emotion and irrationality, and a site of sanctuary and protection. it is therefore, the very figure of the “heimlich” and “unheimlich.” In freudian and surrealist discourse, the home provided a series of interconnected structures, symbolic of both psychic and physical scenarios. Freud’s interpretation of a room as a woman fused the psychological and the corporeal, never moreso than in his work, Mae West’s face which may be used as a surrealist apartment 1934-35. What is perhaps the best known image of a surrealist home, explored the interior as a complex interchange between public and private life, defamiliarizing the domestic and the public together; to uncanny effect.
For me, Yayoi Kusama and Francesca Woodman offer two examples of the experience of the uncanny. A de-personalization that is characterized by spatial and temporal disorientation, in which the person has the sensation that “I know where I am, but I don’t feel like i am at the spot where i find myself.” It’s the feeling of jet lag in De Chirico’s Enigma of the Day, the non-place of the Andreas Gursky, the abandoned house in Woodman, and the obliterating pattern of Kusama. For individuals in these conditions, space becomes a “devouring force” that pursues them, encircles them, digests them finally, “it replaces them.” Once is absorbed by space, and one is homesick no more.
Eternal Summer
A few moons ago, I was fortunate enough to live with two young lovers in Barcelona. She was Spanish, he Australian. After meeting in a brief chance encounter, the pair had found soul mates in each other, albeit, at opposite ends of the earth.
Together we spent many boozy, balmy nights in a haze of sangria, paella and flamenco music, basking amidst white washed buildings for days that went forever. Eating, drinking and skylarking by the ocean, I recall thinking that these were the moments that mattered in the midst of all our living.
I remember in their bedroom there was a poster, an image of two people driving off into the sunset in an old Mustang. “Eternal Summer” was in yellow script across the top. They’d cut out a photo of themselves and pasted it over the couple already in the photo. For them, love felt like an Eternal Summer.
For me, Summer is; feeling the briny sunshine on your face, kissing salty skin, the sand between your toes, in your shoes, in your sheets, in your crotch. Driving with the windows down and the music loud; rain on a steaming pavement, the sound of crickets, the smell of sunscreen, coconut, chlorine and a freshly mowed lawn. Your first callipo; floating too far out to sea. The breathlessness of being thrown by a wave. Seeing the sky, finding your feet again. A ceiling fan to cool your sunburn. Long hot days in the school demountables; going back to your friends house for swims.
The only thing I don’t like about Summer is that it always leaves too soon…
Embrace it while you can, hold on to all of your memories, make new ones, and remember; that in the darkness of Winter, therein lies, in each of us, an Eternal Summer.
The link between masturbation and staring
Let’s consider this. If the gaze is the “erection of the eye,” then staring, when exercised with vigor and intent, is pretty much like masturbating. Both are voluntary activities, considered taboo outside the home, and recur most often in the under-sexed population. No-one likes a chronic masturbator; because, funnily enough, they’re like starers. You never know what goes through their perverse little minds; all you do know, is that they’re amongst us, and as a general rule, it’s best to avoid eye-contact. Come to think of it, nor does anyone like a crier; criers are pussy and without self control. Therefore, if tears were like ejaculatory fluid, (stay with me here) then crying in public, just got a whole lot more serious. If we were to follow this analogy through, then eyelashes lost during a rub, are equivalent to pubic hairs on a bed-sheet. In paid accommodation, a pubic hair on a bed-sheet is as ‘worst-case scenario’ as having Norman Bates set up shop in the room next door. Norman Bates was a masturbating Peeping Tom. Since self-pleasuring and staring are one and the same, and concurrently result in over-working the body to its sexual capacity, it now makes sense that Bates completely lost his shit and became his mother. Actually, a lot of things make sense now. Like The Streets lyrics to “Dry Your Eyes Mate”, or the reason why people think spectacles can hide a multitude of ‘sins’. Glasses are like condoms people, they won’t protect against everything. Either way, if eyes are the windows to the soul, then you don’t need a post-coital glow, or semen-stained pants, for people to know you just had a maz.
- Bianca Georgiou
Whether the euphemistic name ‘Fecal Face’ has its origins in carefully considered marketing strategy, or is the fruit of chance greatness born in a fleeting moment of insanity; it proves, that Shakespeare was wrong. When he penned the lines: “What is in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet?”, referring, it seems, to the meaninglessness of a name, he clearly, wasn’t considering the power of branding. A name iseverything, and one like “Fecal Face” is not only testament to the power of alliteration, but when applied to a contemporary art website, seems to be strangely appropriate. Why? Well, there are clear parallels between the existence, (and subsequent popularity), that comes with having such an absurd title, and a great deal of what young contemporary artists aim to do. First and foremost, they may strive to elicit some form of audience response. Be it positive or negative, this is of little importance; however, one must never underestimate the power of ‘shock’. Secondly, avant gardism is also highly regarded, so too is wit, and a conceptual foundation that no-one, barr the creator, truly understands. Like contemporary art, a website with the name ‘Fecal Face’, (intentions aside), does these same things. It sets trends. Why else is everyone in Surry Hills rocking a “fixie” (fixed gear bike)? The answer may be traced back to this website. Not only does Fecal Face make things cool, purely by association, it is genuinely awesome in what it’s done for contemporary art, and the element of exposure that it continues to offer, up- and- coming artists. What started off as a small zine by the same name, created by website founder John Trippe, is now, a global success. The site gets around 15,000 unique hits a day, and has come a long way since its inception in 2000, when it only featured the art of San Francisco. In my interview with Trippe, we discussed, amongst other things, guerrilla marketing techniques, and the reasons why San Francisco may never overtake New York as the center for contemporary art. We decided, that in the end, location is of little relevance when we live in a world, where a website like Fecal Face is giving all artists a chance to have their work seen, no matter where they may be. And this, crude url’s aside, is something to get excited about. Shawn Barber, San Francisco So how did you guys decide to start the website, and where did you begin? Well congrats on that! I know you started off with San Francisco- based artists on the website, but when, andwhy did you guys go international with your content? I don’t think there was any specific decision to do that, it kind of happened organically. I think 10 years ago there weren’t as many art websites online as there are now, and to be honest, I don’t even know how people found us, but yeah, I guess there just wasn’t that much on the internet if you were interested in art and culture and stuff like that, so we got passed around through links and things, and I put ALOT of stickers up in San Fransisco. But there wasn’t any conscious decision in terms of marketing or anything to try to go globally. I just picked stuff up if I liked it and put it on the site. I suppose everyone asks you this but how did you decide on the name ‘Fecal Face’? In about 1998, I made a small, xeroxed zine. I grew up skateboarding and for a lot of skaters that was a normal thing to do, just to feature your own photography or just cut up magazines and paste them together. The content really wasn’t that important either, it was just about making some sort of homemade magazine to express yourself. The names of the zines back then didn’t really matter either. ‘Fecal Face’ just kind of rolled off the tongue and I thought it seemed funny at the time. Then in 2000 I started learning how to put together websites and kind of kept doing the same thing I was doing with the zine, which was featuring my friends art, and when I had to get a URL I figured why not Fecal Face? The site just kept growing and growing, and every once in a while I’d think about changing it but it’s too late. So the name is just what it is I guess. Ryan Travis Christian, Mariah Do you think because of the website’s name, you attracts a certain crowd? Or repel another? Yeah I think it did for sure. When there weren’t as many art sites online, and maybe some other ones popped up, I’m sure that we stood out. I grew up skateboarding and around punk-rock music and all that, so, I think that if you’re an open minded person it’s just kind of funny. I’m sure that there’s some people that are a bit more buttoned- up, but I guess if you grew up in a certain situation with certain types of music, then maybe ‘Fecal Face’ isn’t that shocking or that weird; whereas, other people might be turned off. I mean now we have a small gallery space in San Francisco and on the awning it says ‘Fecal Face Dot Gallery’ really big and white. We get people driving by, and gawking at the name and taking pictures and stuff like that! So even though we’ve been in San Francisco for 10 years and a lot of people know of us, there’s still a lot of people that are pretty aghast at the name. But ten years, you know, what are you gonna do? Yeah, I think you’re pretty much stuck with it. I totally think you should keep it, I think the reason a lot of people I know are aware of you guys, is because of your name. So I reckon you’re onto a good thing Yeah, well it rolls off the tongue, it’s easy to remember so it’s probably a good thing I guess. So you mentioned that you started a gallery, in 2008, how’s that all going? Are you booked out for a while? Yeah we’re doing pretty good. It’s just a small gallery space. I like to be on top of everything that I do and the website’s enough work as it is, so it’s pretty small which I like, because then I can stay on top of things. It’s good, it’ s nice to bring in artists that we like. It’s nice to see it in person, and be around it, and it’s good to show the people of San Francisco the work that we’re into. We have a lot of good shows coming up, like Damon Soule, Josh Keyes, Mi Ju and Henry Gunderson, and we have a good 10 years online, so we know a lot of talented artists and and thankfully they’re willing to put a Fecal Face stamp on their work and their career. Ivana Klickovic, Belgrade Serbia Out of all the artists you get on the website, how do you decide what goes in the gallery and what doesn’t? I guess we choose artists who are at the same time in their progression as we are. What we expect from artists we show is that they’re taking their work seriously. Our shows just kind of work out when we’re in conversation and we say ‘Hey! Actually you should have a show at Fecal Face. Would you be into that?’ and then it’s like ‘yeah, alright, lets pick a month’ and then the calendar fills up pretty quickly. So the key is not to book too many shows because it just stresses you out cos you have to take things off the walls, paint the walls and package art and all that. I feel that with the Sydney art scene, it could be because I’m bias, but I’m seeing guys getting shown a lot more than female artists. Are you trying to create a balance in the San Francisco art scene? Umm, I don’t know how things work out. There’s probably some similarities with me being a man, so male artists are probably having the same feelings, grew up the same way, or have the same mental picture, so maybe we might show a little more men but I’m a pretty sensitive guy so I know that all work is great. But the conscious decision to choose one person’s art, over another, I don’t really have those kind of discussions in my head, I probably should think about it a little more often but I just go off my gut reaction of what I like, and what I feel that we’d like to showcase. I should probably start focusing a little bit more on female artists though. I actually do agree with you that decisions of what gets shown and what doesn’t, should be based on the art though, not the artist’s gender. But I suppose there does come a time when you have to consider balance. Ok, so, enough on gender equality. What’s the best thing about being online? And what do you think the internet has done for contemporary art? Well I’m very visually stimulated, like most of us who like art are, so the internet is like an endless supply of new artists and new things to see. I think because the internet is so accessible, work changes. You could look online, spend some time over the weekend looking at different artists and you could go back 100 years and you could look at the people who are creating work now, and that’s obviously going to influence what you, as an artist, are creating. So I would imagine that the whole visual language is accelerating exponentially. I find that really exciting to know that I could be shocked and amazed visually on a day to day basis. How did you first get people interested in the site? I’ve heard that you employed some guerrilla marketing techniques? Yeah, I had a lot of friends that did graffiti and I did a little tagging but I just liked doing the stickers. It was fun to put up Fecal Face.com stickers all over San Francisco at one point. I like it for the same reason that people do tagging, because you see your thing and you’re like ‘oh yeah Fecal Face’. A lot of people were hesitant because they didn’t know it was a real website because the whole ‘dot com’ boom was going on in 2000 and I think a lot of people thought it was a critique on all the yuppies that were moving to San Francisco at that time, and making rent too expensive for us to live here, but yeah, I loved it. So we did a lot of stickers and that’s how people found out about us, and then I think there was a lot of emailing going on, and that kind of thing. Mel Kadel, Ecko Park, L.A. So what do you want to achieve with your website and what do you want people to get out of it? Sometimes it’s hard to think that there’s other people out there when you’re sitting at your computer. I just like to showcase things that I think are intelligent, funny, interesting, stimulating; to elevate our social ignorance that the United States are sort of engulfed in. I know Fecal Face isn’t like the New York Times, and that’s not what I aspire it to be. I don’t really have any grand ideas of what I want it to be, but its basically a way for me to enjoy myself and if other people like it, that’s great. Who are some of the artists that you’re excited about right now? Like I said, this is what’s so great about the internet, that it literally changes everyday. But there are some people here in San Francisco that I’m really excited about. There’s Henry Gunderson, he’s 19 and he just did his second year at San Francisco Art Institute and it’s really exciting to see someone, and through their art, see who their influences are, that their voice is really unique and it’s their own. His skills are really above a lot of people that I see. It’s inspiring to see someone like that with such great talent but yeah, that’s the internet. All the time you can see how so many people are influenced by each other and then just to see someone with their own unique perspective and their own unique skill, is very nice to come across. Tom Long What would be your advice to young artists who have their own website or blog, on how to get noticed? Well personally, its my opinion, but I like people who put their artworks online in a clean format, with not a lot of flash. If they’ve got a nice, clean website, and the background is white, the artworks stand out. But yeah, my advice would be to just have fun with it, to not worry about anything else, just do what you want to do. So in terms of San Fran vs. New York, do you think that San Fran will ever take over as the centre of contemporary art? I think New York will still be the epicentre for a while. There’s just so much financial support for artists, a lot of people with big trust funds, who go back a couple of generations, and they buy alot of art. Especially with the global recession right now, people can’t afford to, I’m sure that people would like to, but I don’t think San Francisco has as much of a financial backing on art as other places. I mean, we have a lot of artists that live here, but at a certain point when you’re trying to make a living off it, people tend to gravitate towards NYC. Then again, it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you’re doing what you’re into. It’s nice to make money off artwork but not many people get that option. Henry Gunderson, San Francisco Yeah I suppose NYC has this great history, and as long as people continue to gravitate there, it’s not going to change, but if artists start to move to places like San Francisco, then maybe things will change? Oh yeah definitely. And that’s what I was going to say about the internet. You don’t have to physically be in a city, I mean its definitely a benefit, but there’s artists all over the world that are being tied together through the internet, and there are artists that are surviving on their work and living in the middle of the country and are 1000 miles from a big city. So that’s kind of cool! What’s the most bazaar kind of art that you’ve seen on Fecal Face? Ummm. I don’t know. That’s the problem with the internet, now my brain is just so tiny (Laughs). There’s a cool thing we’re putting up later today, it’s this guy who has a box that is basically tied to the internet and it’s constantly putting itself for sale on Ebay. (Laughs) Yeah I read about that! (Laughs) Yeah he sent a link to me about it today, and that’s pretty cool. I like that! So the box itself is what people buy? You buy the box, but through the contract you have to connect it to the internet and when it’s connected to the internet it tries to sell itself through Ebay, and then someone will buy it from you and so the artist gets a certain amount of percentage of the sale. I think its a neat idea! So it’s really just a comment on the art market in general? Yeah it is actually! You better check out Fecal Face to get the full story (Laughs). Damon Soule, San Francisco So how much time do you spend on the website? Um, like 8, 9,10 hours a day! But you know, some of that is running errands and shipping out art, and that’s including the gallery, it’s definitely a full time job. And how many hits do you guys get a day? Ummm, it’s generally around 15,000 unique visitors, but I try not to look at that because it makes me nervous for some reason (Laughs). That’s amazing! Do you ever think you’ll do a 360 and go back to the print medium? That would be a much more relaxing life. I used to work at a skateboard magazine, and one week out of the month we would have crazy deadlines, but once the magazine was sent away to the printer we could at least relax for a week or two. But with the website, and the way the world works now, it’s kind of a bummer because you get no downtime. It’s nice to look at art in its physical form but in terms of the site and print, it’d be awesome to have it all going at the same time and to have it coincide with the website. But yeah, I don’t know… Either way, the website is awesome, and everyone should check it out. Get inspired. To purchase tickets to Sydney’s Semi Permanent conference, where you can hear John Trippe speak about his website, go here.
I actually started a homemade magazine, a little zine, probably around 1998, and then I started the website by myself, and that was in 2000. Which means that this April marks our 10th year!
Ye Rin Mok
