“Repugnance is the sentry standing right near the door to those things we desire most.”1
In this essay I wish to explore two artworks whose themes and aesthetics are not obviously comparable; Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dali’s In Voluptas Mors (1951), and contemporary Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye’s series of Anal Kisses (1999). Both artworks can be situated within the framework of ideas expressed in George Bataille’s Visions of Excess: Selected Writings (1985). The unifying factor is a fascination with death and decay juxtaposed with desire and sexual gratification.
I wish to examine one text in particular in Visions of Excess, but will begin by situating this text within the context of contemporary thought and events. In early twentieth century French thought we see a counter-Enlightenment of sorts which changed the way the senses are perceived, toppling sight from it’s perch as the highest of the senses. Surrealist George Bataille disregarded the eye’s privilege as separate or above the rest of the body with its primary functionalities and wastes. This disenchantment of vision can be seen to be in part, a result of the First World War. Indeed Bataille himself experienced the stinking trenches of wartime Europe. Martin Jay articulates this notion in his 1994 book, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought.’:
‘It is striking that many of Bataille’s obsessive themes would betray an affinity for the experiences of degridation, pollution, violence, and communal bonding which were characteristic of life in the trenches. None of those themes was as dramatically intertwined with the war’s impact as that of the eye.’2
Jay also provides insight on Bataille’s obsession with the eye – and with blindness – attributing this in part to his experiences of his father who was blinded and paralysed.
In The Story of the Eye, Bataille succeeds in drawing the eye back from its heady status as mindful observer, using the metaphor of a phallus to express feelings of the abject; “I even thought my eyes were bulging from my head, erectile with horror”3
I will now begin to look at one writing from Visions of Excess;The Solar Anus. This sees a world as a circulating, copulating, endlessly connected being – in which the turning of the earth is synonymous with sexual activity of its inhabitants:
“The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons. These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.”4
In this ‘purely parodic’5 world, one of the main themes is the duality of the phallic sun, with its circular movement; and the nightly sea, with its continuously advancing and receding tide. The tides here are “coitus of the earth with the moon”6 and the cycle of water, evaporating and then raining down is akin sexual movement. Circular movement is reiterated throughout the text as the governing principle in this world and indeed the universe. Bataille uses the image of the locomotive to explain this ongoing forward motion. So the pistons’ movement in and out of their brackets is akin to sexual intercourse, this fueling the rotation of the wheels, in the figure of love, and pushing the contraption along the earth’s surface. In this world nothing is distinct, but inexplicably linked to everything else. As Bataille states; ‘Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rythym of this rotation, the image of this movement is not the turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.’7
This phallic imagery is repeated throughout The Solar Anus, especially in reference to the sun, where we see the sun’s rays as shafts, relentlessly pushing down to earth the earth’s surface but never reaching the night.
The volcanoes on the earth’s surface are compared to anuses, “violently ejecting the contents of its entrails”.8 This is evocative both of excretion of waste from the body, and of climax as a moment of absolute violence and expulsion. In The Metaphor of the Eye, Roland Barthes wrote – of Bataille’s works – that ‘it is the very equivalence of ocular and genital which is original…the paradigm begins nowhere.’9
The Solar Anus itself is paradoxical, a duality of light and dark. The anus, at the end of the body, represents excrement and decay, a reminder of our earthly bodies and the inevitability of death. But it is also in these earthly bodies that desire lies. That the anus is blinding to Bataille suggests that it is its beauty that defies its very essence of darkness. As Bataille writes;
“The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night.”10
There is here a duality in the form of play on words with annulus, meaning ‘little ring’ in Latin11. This image is of course representative of the anus itself but may also reference the circular movement of love, or the physical consummation of love in the form of a ring.
To look to the night in the form of the anus instead of the phallic sun is subversive and particular to humans, as Bataille states;
“Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; Human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to the other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.
Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions”12
Like The Solar Anus, the work of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye is paradoxical, defined by contradictions between decoration and decay, beauty and ugliness, purity and dirt, pleasure and pain. By holding opposing ideas and imagery against each other, Delvoye succeeds in creating new meaning and a distinctive style despite his plethora of methods. As Michael Onfrey writes; “What is his style like, then? ….As a technique belonging to our age of accidents, catastrophes and calamities, the oxymoron associates two contradictory terms or instances.”13
One example of Delvoye’s work that exhibits this are his x-rays, a process usually used to see what is wrong with the body; to check for broken bones, cancerous tumors et cetera. The artist instead uses the x-ray to show acts of sex: kissing, oral sex and masturbation, as well as bodies in the process of excretion.
The body of work that I wish to focus on for this enquiry however is Delvoye’s series of Anal Kisses (1999). These are exactly what their description suggests; a ‘kiss’ on a piece of hotel stationary, created by applying lipstick to the anus. These are evocative of documentation of fleeting acquaintances or sexual activity in a hotel room; a trace of the passion of the night before. The lipstick kiss-mark is a symbol of female sexuality and passion.
Thus here lies a contradiction, a conflict between the anus simply as the end of the human digestive system, and as a point of pleasure and desire. This is Bataille’s Solar Anus. This is an acknowledgement and celebration of the anus as an erogenous zone, not just something to be hidden beneath layers of clothes in the dark. It is an intimate portrait of the anus, and of the relationship between artist and subject. There are obvious connotations of homosexuality here, with the anus being more inexplicably linked to homosexual sex than with heterosexual sex.
Ideas about taboo also feature here, as Freud said, “The magical power that is attributed to taboo is based on the capacity for arousing temptation.”14
We see this at play in The Solar Anus where the point of fixation is the anus of a girl of just eighteen years, as Bataille writes; ‘I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I have been able to say: you are the night.’15 It is as if it is the guilty conscience, wary of trespassing taboo which makes the act of sex – or ‘violation’ – all the more seductive. To quote Freud again; ‘We are so constituted that we gain pleasure only from the contrast, and only very little from the condition itself.’16
The notion of humankind finding pleasure in the forbidden – or taboo – if followed to its natural end, can be traced to the story of Adam and Eve, the apple becoming a recurring symbol for temptation and sin. Indeed Venus, goddess of love, is often portrayed holding an apple in renaissance painting.
In an interview with the artist, Nicholas Bourriard said, “I see all of your work revolving around those two extremes, the decorative and the excremental.”17 This is particularly descriptive of this series as lipstick is usually used as decoration, in order to maximize the feminine and to make oneself more sexually attractive. Here it is applied to the site of excretion in an act of subversive sexuality.
This act mirrors the natural reddening and projection of the anus and genitals of apes in anticipation of sexual activity which Bataille describes in The Jesuve, and again in The sacrifice of the Gibbon.
A quote by the artist himself in the same interview is evocative of the world imagined in Bataille’s The Solar Anus: “We are the result of millions and millions of seductive acts that were successful genetically. And everything is wasted. The ornament to an extent is a form of waste. Shit is too, for everyone.”18 In this we can see that there is another element to Anus Kisses, the lipstick as a wasted ornament when applied to either the lips or the anus. And the universality of the human body; its systems, waste and desires. Salvador Dali once wrote words to the same effect, stating “Gold and Shit, as is well known, represent the same thing to psychoanalysts.”19
Salvador Dali’s In Voluptas Mors “Voluptuous Death” (1951) explores themes of the duality of seduction and horror, thus it can be situated within the framework of Bataille’s Visions of Excess. Indeed Bataille himself was influenced by the work of the Spanish surrealist, which further concreted his obsession with the eye. Most notably Un Chein Andalou, the short film he made with Luis Brunel in 1929, which features the apparent slitting open of a young woman’s eye juxtaposed with images of clouds moving across the sky. I would like to note here, Martin Jay’s discussion of usage of imagery of the sky in the interwar years. He talks of the ‘all encompassing sky’20 providing an escape from the hazy chaos and filth of the trenches of World War One.
The film is mentioned in Eye (Visions of Excess) where Bataille writes; ‘It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably the boundary of horror.’21 and in Documents, the journal that Bataille edited between 1929 and 1930.
The photograph I wish to focus on here, In Voluptas Mors was made in collaboration with Phillipe Halsman features a human skull – a tableu vivant – made up of the bodies of seven naked women. The artist stands in the foreground assuming the pose of a circus ringleader perhaps, facing neither the women behind him, nor the viewer.
More than just a memento mori, this image is a fusion of sex and death. Following the symbolic tradition of vanitas (Latin; emptiness22), it serves as a reminder of the futility of pleasure and the certain inevitability of death. There is a contradiction here as one finds death in the voluptuous; the voluptuous in the ultimate image of death and descent, the human skull.
The voluptuous, a word coming from the name given to the greek goddess of sexual pleasure; voluptas, is a theme that seems to recur in the writing of the artist himself. From a young age, the artist is struck by the headiness of death and the narcissistic voluptuousness of his own body.23 There is a conflict between the ‘cold voluptuousness’ of death and the artist’s own lucid passion to succeed himself.24
Dali explores his own fascination with death in Maniac Eyeball, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (2008), indeed the entire first chapter is devoted to this theme. He describes his childhood experiences with death and his insatiable attraction to dead things. In one instance he is drawn to a dying bat and is overcome by the desire to touch, to kiss and eventually to bite the head off the animal.
In another instance later on, he describes a purifying dead porcupine which he forces himself to touch despite his body’s protests, he writes; “I was totally overcome by the desire, the need to touch that pile of vermin.”25 This relates to Bataille’s fascination with the informe, or formlessness, of peutrifying flesh on which he wrote in Documents.26
In a direct reference to Bataille’s The Solar Anus, on contemplating his own body after death, Dali compares the farting of his decaying body to a volcano.27
This morbid fascination which seems to be engrained within the human condition and can be described by the term inter-repulsion, the oscillation between attraction and repulsion, outlined here by Olivier Chow: “Inter-repulsion creates a pornography of death since it shows us our darkest and most obscene object of death.”28 Maybe it is only through exploring death that we can truly exist, Rodolphe Gasche suggests a definition for existence as “permanent decomposition, that is to say, governed the the tragic principle.”29
It is important here to consider ideas of the abject, as discussed in Julia Kristeva’s Power’s of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). As she states here:
‘It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful- a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned.’30
She defines the abject as something which disrupts a predetermined order or system, revealing the familiar or uncanny as something separate, something sinister. Like Bataille she attributes the abject nature of bodily waste to its affinity with death, ‘… refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit of what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death.’31
1Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 75
2Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (1944) University of California Press, 1994
3Bataille, George, Story of the Eye, page 103
4Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985 page 6
5Ibid, page 5
6Ibid, page 7
7Ibid, page 7
8Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985 page 8
9Barthes, Roland, The Metaphor of the Eye (1963) In Critical essays, Evanston, 1972, page 242
10Ibid. page 9
11Latdict: Latin Dictionary and Grammar Resource http://www.latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/annulus Last accessed 13/1/14 at 1:30 pm
12Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985 page 8
13Onfray, Micheal, Michael Onfray on Wim Delvoye: Vitraux in Vitro et in Viro, for Eldorado exhibition catalogue, 2006
14Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo (London & New York: Routledge, 2002)
15Bataille, George, The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, page 9
16Freud, Sigmund, Civilisation and its Discontents, Penguin London, 2002, page 27
17Bourriaud, Nicholas, in interview with Delvoye, Wim for Gallerie Perrotin, www.perrotin.com (last accessed 8/1/14 at 10:45pm)
18Delvoye, Wim in interview for Gallerie Perrotin, www.perrotin.com (last accessed 8/1/14 at 10:45pm)
19Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 71
20Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (1944) University of California Press, 1994, page 217
21Bataille, George, Eye, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927 -1939, University of Minnesota Press, 1985, page 17
22 Latdict: Latin Dictionary and grammar resource, http://www.latin-dictionary.net/definition/38353/vanitas-vanitatis last accessed 13/1/14 at 1:30pm
23Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 66
24Ibid, page 5
25Ibid, page 7
26Georges Bataille: Informe. Documents 7(December 1929), p. 382. [Reprinted/translated in: Bataille 1970, p. 217
27Dali, Salvador, and Parinand, Andre, Maniac Eyeball: The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, Solar Books, 2008, page 5
28Chow, Olivier, Idols/Odures: Inter-repulsion in Documents’ big toes, Drain Magazine, 2006, www.drainmag.com (last accessed 9/1/14 at 4:30pm)
29Gasche, Rodolphe, The Heterological Almanac, On Bataille: Critical Essays, State University of New York Press, 1995, page 180
30Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia UP, 1982, page 1
31Ibid, page 3
