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HEADLESS

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Lutz Presser Exhibition catalogue

ISBN: 978-9963-275-78-6 © 2018 Lutz Presser All right reserved. Published by Lutz Presser Cyprus

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647-1652, Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

The following is a brief clarification of a series of ten padded paintings of floating heads I fabricated in 2018 after Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa (1647-1642). I employ extracts from my The Art of Man Ray (Edwin Mellen Press, New York, 2018).

St Teresa’s description of “transverberation” relates to female “enlightenment”, which is a linking of the womb and the heart and is radically different to male enlightenment, which links the genitals and the brain. The latter is often described as the opening of the thousand-petaled lotus atop man’s head. Both the female and male experiences supposedly meld sensual and spiritual occurrences, where matter and spirit become one.

St Teresa of Avila’s experience of transverberation was achieved only after long sessions of physical suffering. She describes it as an ecstatic linking of the heart and womb. She said:

It pleased the Lord that I should sometimes see the following vision. I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily form—a type which I am not in the habit of seeing, except very rarely…He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire. They must be those who are called cherubim: they do not tell me their names, but I am well aware that there is a great difference between certain angels and others, and others still, of a kind that I could not possibly explain. In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share.1

Bernini’s Baroque marble, life-size, carvings of the saint and cherubim is the central sculptural tableau situated in an elevated aedicule in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Although the Teresa group is often pictorially reproduced, the two theatre boxes of male witnesses observing her ecstatic swoon, located on either side of her, are not.

Patriarchal society has traditionally mistrusted women who like St Teresa have experienced “headlessness”.

Between 1936-1939 Georges Bataille, Curator of Oriental Coins at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, saw published a magazine entitled Acéphale. Today Bataille is credited with being a major contributor to Surrealist thinking, advocating in his writing male transcendence through the violent suppression of the female, and as a curator of ancient artifacts had access to material others didn’t. He and his close friend Michel Leiris moved in artistic circles and influenced a number of them including a major figure such as Picasso.

Acéphale was a Gnostic god of magicians, who was directly linked with the Egyptian Set and his solar counterpart Horus.2He was a god of empowerment who could render men immortal.3When headless, or ass-headed, he represented male and female principles, or darkness and light in a single body, as well as the triumph of life over death through resurrection.4He is often depicted wielding his detachable phallus or “fouet”. In the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead he is described as:

Un lion puissant, aux plumes élevées, qui possède la double couronne et est armé du fouet…Tu possèdes un phallus fort au moment du lever (du soleil), luminaire qui se lève sans limites. Tue es celui qui revêt des apparences multiples, et qui se dissimule à ses enfants, l’intérieur  de l’oeil (du soleil).5

Bataille’s Acéphale, as seen in his magazine, when not headless was depicted as bull-headed and synonymous with the Minotaur . Thus Bataille’s god, who could assist sorcerers’ apprentices to become masters of magic, symbolized male solar empowerment through the experience intérieure. Bataille’s cover version of Acéphale as drawn by André Masson was a headless, human form; the head reappears as a skull in the place of the genitals. Apart from the bull-headed version, another image from the journal shows Acéphale/Dionysus with Medusa’s castrating head in place of his genitals. The exposed abdomen reveals the intestines in the form of a dodécadale labyrinth. According to Allen Weiss: The Acephale is a contestation of the Platonic body politic, where reason, seated in the head, rules the lower spirited and appetitive forces.6

In his left hand he holds a sword which signifies violence and power and was the instrument which decapitated the god, cut out his heart (held in his right hand), and lacerated the abdomen to expose the labyrinthine section of the viscera. Weiss continues: The paths of chance are indicated in the center of the figure of the Acephale, where intestines in the form of a labyrinth are revealed. The labyrinth, equivalent to the Nietzschian sign of earth, is an all-encompassing signifier, embracing every contradiction and possibility from the chaotic to the structured, the aleatoric to the necessary, the sacred and the profane, and from life to death.7

The purpose of such single-line labyrinths is not to get lost, but to persevere in the difficult quest, for it is through the difficulty of the quest that the contradictions or opposites are reconciled. Bataille clarifies:

He (Acephale) reunites Birth and Death in the same eruption. He is neither man nor god. He is not me but is more me than myself; his abdomen is the Daedalus in which he himself loses his way, misleads me along with him, and within which I rediscover myself as him, that is to say as a monster.8

This total man (Nietzschian Übermensch) that Bataille speaks of is the monster in oneself which must be sacrificed within the Labyrinth. This interior experience entails loss of identity and dissolution of the self which enables the self the opportunity of an indefinite series of identities and transformations. This process gives the creative male the power of Eternal Return.

Thus it seems when the female is masked or headless she becomes the catalyst for the male to see the face of the god and initiates the transformational process. Hence even an undated and hastily scribbled over sketch like Esquisse d’un centaure found in one of Picasso’s sketchbooks, where a horse-headed, not ass-headed, female whose hands are tied behind her back, would appear to be replete with layered meaning. Meanings seemingly unrelated to quaint picturesque images of mythology, but personal, pictorial keys or triggers to male empowerment through violent suppression of the female. The “rubbing-out” of the figure equates with Man Ray’s Nu voilé .

Ecstasy stems from the Greek ek, out, and histani, to place, which means to stand outside oneself, to be beside oneself with joy, to stand forth naked.9Out-of-body experience is linked with madness because one loses one’s head. The Surrealists often depicted headlessness, particularly of women. Sidra Stich in Anxious Images states:

And though the bodies show considerable development, the figures carry only the most embryonic of heads, or no heads at all, thereby displacing emphasis from the intellectual realm to the corporeal, sensorial realms. Without heads or reduced heads, the figures no longer offer evidence of their superior status. On the one hand this lowers and declassifies them from an exclusively human rank, and on the other, it devalues thinking itself.10

Rosalind Krauss in the Optical Unconscious argues that in The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933) Salvador Dali rotates the women from a vertical to a horizontal state in order to represent ecstasy, and equates them with the hysterical “falling” women the Surrealists were so fascinated and obsessed with observing, and thereby lowering their status from human to animal.11She also equates the labyrinth, the home of the Minotaur to horizontality.12The labyrinth is a female domain and with patriarchy seems to have become an artificial womb, or bachelor machine, where man gives birth to himself. It became the birth place of heroes. The original myth is a Cretan one and we are told that the labyrinth was designed by Daedalus, who had been taken in by King Minos after escaping Athens. Daedalus designed the labyrinth in response to Queen Parsiphae having had sex with the white bull. The issue of the coupling produced the Minotaur. The labyrinth became the monster’s prison. The minotaur fed on human flesh and the Athenians were obliged to send regular tributes of young men and women. Ariadne fell in love with Theseus, who was a member of the final tribute and requested Daedalus’ assistance to save her lover. He gave her a ball of string. Theseus entered the labyrinth unraveling the string, killed the Minotaur and retraced his steps by rolling up the string again, and exited the treacherous labyrinth by the same way that he had entered. The labyrinth appears to be a transformational place of empowerment, where men can give birth to themselves as heroes. Krauss is correct in highlighting the horizontality of this action, because Theseus exited the artificial womb a new man, a superman, but still left the same way he had entered. However, according to the myth Daedalus himself and his son Icarus were imprisoned in the labyrinth by Minos when the king realized Ariadne had escaped to Delos with Theseus. How would this punish Daedalus when he had designed the labyrinth and held its key? It would seem that the labyrinth also stands for the birthplace of male genius, because Daedalus and Icarus escaped vertically into the air by constructing wings of wax. Unfortunately Icarus wasn’t brilliant enough, because his wings melted and he plummeted to his death, whereas Daedalus flew off to further adventures.13

Justine does not experience her clairvoyant visions horizontally, but vertically, she is a pendu femelle and a veritable goddess. However, just like Ariadne she remains an object of exchange and a muse, or conduit operating between male polarities. She hangs between God and Seabrook, while Ariadne is the lifeline between Daedalus (genius) and Theseus (hero). Justine (a young woman who participated in William Seabrook’s experiments who was photographed by Man Ray) does not experience her clairvoyant visions horizontally, but vertically, she is a pendu femelle and a veritable goddess. However, just like Ariadne she remains an object of exchange and a muse, or conduit operating between male polarities. She hangs between God and Seabrook, while Ariadne is the lifeline between Daedalus (genius) and Theseus (hero).

There are numerous examples of photographs in Man Ray’s oeuvre of nude women with their arms raised, so much so it could be seen as a signature pose for the artist. In terms of body language this gesture appears to be very meaningful for Man Ray. It has been demonstrated above that he uses the raised arms in images ranging from constructing the head of the minotaur, to a nude whose head is solarised and thereby uses the arms as a framing device to further isolate the lack of head, to images where the head is in shadow and looks non-existent, to documenting Seabrook’s SM sessions of hanging women. Clasping the hands behind the head is a gesture of confidence and superiority, whereas fully raising the arms above the head is a universal sign of surrender or abandonment. In both situations then, raising the arms is a gesture moving from a symbol of self-empowerment to one of relinquishing power totally. In terms of the foregoing analysis it seems a short distance from raising the arms/surrender to tying and dangling. There are also a number of images by Man Ray, always of females, where the arms have been removed completely. Vénus restaurée, which is a cast of Venus DeMilo, is armless, legless and headless, but it still appears vital for the artist to restrain the cast with a rope binding it, similarly to Enigme. Lee Miller in a still from Cocteau’s film Blood of the Poet (1930), Nude (circa 1930), the four shots of Nude Female Torso, (circa 1930), all share being deprived of their arms. Man Ray achieves the illusion of armlessness in Figures 60 and 61 by carefully encasing the models’ arms in a dark fabric, so when photographed against a dark background the arms disappear, just like the masked heads do. Figure 62 is entitled Statue et Tête (c. 1921) where the artist grafts a living head to the armless, legless Venus plaster cast. Either way, whether the women’s arms are raised or cut off, it seems that for Man Ray, Seabrook and other creative men, such actions are about disempowerment of the formidable Other, and these visual gestures co-inside and correlate with André Masson’s 1928 design for de Sade’s Justine, where the practice of algolagnia and female sufferance and suspension generate erotic release, transcendence and fulfillment in the male, whether she goes “through the wall” or not. Sometimes it seems such games get out of hand, as is testified by a police photograph of one of Jack the Ripper’s gutted victims of a pendu femelle, used to illustrate Maurice Heine’s “Regards sur l’enfer anthropoclasique”, published in Minotaure, of an imaginary conversation between a professor, the Marquis de Sade and Jack the Ripper.14Thus, as Georges Bataille proposes throughout L’Érotisme, female passivity and sufferance are the catalyst for male transcendence and are directly linked with death.15

If Bernini’s Saint Teresa was devoid of drapery, Dali’s women had bodies, and Duchamp’s Bride of the Etant donnés was accessible, their reclining, relaxed abandonment, would be similar to the mannequins produced by Clemente Susini (1754-1814). His didactic, life-sized, anatomical models are as realistic as was possible in his day. They have human hair, glass eyes and at first glance are highly erotic images of nakedness, rather than nudity. His Statua Scomponibile wears only a pearl choker.16Her supine body lies on soft cushions and loose drapery, her slightly parted lips look moist and kissable; her eyes are vacant and half closed; her nipples, erect. She is made of wax and her body colour is life-like, exhibiting the glow of health and youthfulness. She does not display the pallor of death. When her almost heaving breast is removed, one can access her exposed viscera. Susini’s Statua della Sventrata is similarly seductive. The right leg of the reclining, languid blonde, is slightly raised; her expression is vacant and her cheeks are flushed. Her partially braided hair carefully frames her fully disemboweled entrails.17This bizarre object is distinctly sexual and reminds us of the concept of “woman-as-shit”: woman as the source of warmth, heat, gestation and fecundity, here displaying not only her dissected uterus, but also the organ wherein the process of transmutation is completed, i.e., the labyrinthine bowel. Both models recall Ernst’s Anatomy of the Bride, where the inquisitive male has cleared out all the female’s internal plumbing in search of what makes her tick. La Sventrata, in particular, is reminiscent of another photograph used by Heine illustrating his Minotaure article, where we see the remains of Jack the Ripper’s sadistic and frenzied excavation of the Other. Thus we see what results if Saint Teresa’s male inquisitors, or Seabrook and Man Ray’s observational probings had expressed their curiosity in an even more aggressive and socially unacceptable manner. Furthermore, it leaves the impression that Duchamp’s second Bride would appeal to necrophiliacs in her invitation to join her in her eroticized dance of death.

Woman as muse elevates her, but disconnects her from the process of making art, her role is to inspire great works in men. Patriarchal fear of the Other, creates a special place for her power. It is the elevated and untouchable position of the Virgin who conceived immaculately, who hovers in the sky, the pendu femelle, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth. Antonius Andreas von Kresimowsky’s 18th century illustration, entitled Christliches Wanders-Mann (1756), demonstrates that Virgin-Ariadne-Muses such as Justine/Renée/Janet (Seabrook’s helpers), can survey the pitfalls of the man’s journey from her elevated, clairvoyant position, allowing her to guide her male charge, with her “super-vision”, to the centre of the labyrinth, the place of his rebirth as immortal hero. That Kresimowsky follows a patriarchal model can be deduced from the observation that the feminine hovering presence acts as the conduit between male god, depicted as the eye in the triangle, and the journeyman she guides through the earthly maze, while she floats in no-man’s land. On reaching his goal and absorbing his guide’s power, he returns the same way, having symbolically given birth to himself. It is a model of the male’s quest for immortality.

Man Ray participated in the Ariadne syndrome and demonstrated his nervousness in relation to female creators by depicting Meret Oppenheim as a phallic woman. Moreover, he played a crucial role in introducing Dora Maar to Picasso.18Ray clarifies that Picasso rewarded him with a signed copy of Minotauromachy, arguably the most complex and layered of Picasso’s images about himself as Minotaur.19

Jean Franco, in Plotting Women, demonstrates that female ecstatic desire was directly linked with female self-creation, and equivalent to the hero’s troubled journey towards immortality. The ecstatic or hysterical woman gives birth to herself as does the hero in the labyrinth. The female’s blissful soaring appears to be no different from the male’s, in that both are an escape from the self. Patriarchal systems may acknowledge that the female appears to be more gifted with the ability to experience visions, raptures and revelations, but because males interpreted these experiences, they were also perceived as extremely dangerous.20Franco, citing a Mexican inquisitor states:

Since women are not only weaker and more susceptible, but are humid, crass, and viscose by nature, and because this temperament are not only subject to lunatic impressions, but are easily overcome by passions of hatred, love, happiness and sadness.21

The knowledge gained by female mystics was not male intellectual understanding, it was a bodily sensation as Saint Teresa pointed out. Franco continues: Transported in dreams and visions beyond the narrow confines of the cell, the mystic flew across time and space, beheld the future, and was allowed to penetrate the secrets of purgatory and heaven itself, before returning like a homing pigeon to her cell. This flight was the feminine equivalent of the heroic journey of self-transformation, with the difference that it met no obstacles and was less a narrative than an epiphany. The epiphany, however, tended to make the mystic mute and secretive.22

1 The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, 3 vols., tran & ed. E.A.Peers, Sheed & Ward, London, 1946, vol 1, pp.192-193. 2 Delatte, A. & Derchain, Ph. Les intailles magiques greco-egyptiennes, Biblioteque Nationale, Paris, 1964, pp.23-76 3 ibid, pp.42-51 4 ibid, pp.44-46 5 ibid, pp.45-46 6 Weiss, A.S. “Impossible Sovereignty: Between ‘The Will to Power’ and ‘The Will to Change’”, October, 36, 1986, p.130. 7 ibid, pp.130-139. 8 Acephale, no. 1, “La Conjuration Sacree”, 24 June, 1936 (unpaginated). 9 Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, Dorset & Baber, New York, 1983, pp. 574-575. Petersson, op.cit. pp.25-35. 10 Stich, S. op.cit. p.40. 11 Krauss, R. The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, 1993, pp. 156-157. 12 idem, pp.168-171. 13 Presser, L. Modernism and Patriarchy in the Work of Picasso, Duchamp, Beuys, Warhol and Kahlo, PhD Thesis, Monash University, Melbourne, 1995, pp.1-358. 14 Heine, M. “Regards sur l’enfer anthropoclasique”, Minotaure, 8, 1936, pp.41-45. 15 Bataille, G. L’Erotisme, Les Editions de minuit, Paris, 1957, pp. 17-306. 16 Buci, M. Anatomia come Arte, Edizioni d’Arte II Fiorino, Florence,1990, pp 189-202, plates VIII-XIII. 17 Buci, ibid, plates XVIV-XVII 18 Hubert, R. R. “From Dejeuner en fourrure o Coroline: Meret Oppenheim’s Chronicle of Surrealism”, Surrealism and Women, pp.40-41. Ray, M. Self Portrait, p. 179. 19 Ray, idem. 20 Franco, J. Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico, Verso, London, 1989, pp. 16-21, 106-112. 21 Franco, ibid, p. 7 22 Franco, ibid, p.16.

ISBN: 978-9963-275-78-6