Vol. II. Issue. III September 2011 - The Criterion: An International ...

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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 clown on him. When alas, his masterful paintbrush drips down the side of his legs, she lines her legs with stockings and stuffs his money in her purse. Olympia, the sweet delicate thing, who is situated on a pedestal, must have performed wondrously on the elaborately staged bedding for Manet’s delight. He must have acted on a lark. He simply understood how the goddesses of the past were the whores, transvestites, and suicides of the future. The canvas is a Trompe l'oleil illusion. He did what the authorities told him he shouldn't have done. By doing so, he opened the hatch into the future where the walls accept the filth of each anus and injury as expressive communication. Decency was destroyed by a few strokes of paint bristle. Voices murmured in the art-pulpit, voices that instructed the painter to denounce his own work. Voices organized an orderly fascist future to ensure that no such indecency would slip through. Each artwork would be catalogued and approved based on standards. Pornography would not be accepted into the official record. Pornography would be exiled to the dark corners of the collection, the bathroom stalls, pages landing in the living hands that jitter with excitement, enclosing a member that erupts onto the broken floor. Manet's Olympia lands in an uncertain space. It lands somewhere at the end and somewhere at the beginning. And still I wonder in vain if his depiction of the slave is meant to be ironic. When you are not fully awake and you haven't slept for hours and too many hours have already past to try to sleep, your mind goes into a sleep-like state. The person inside of you slows down into a rhythm as gradual as plant growth. An empty pocket of time appears and you realize it increases by halved increments and will continue in an eternal half-life of time. If pressed for answers to trivial questions like those that they ask at airports…do you have any liquids in quantities greater than 4 oz, you might answer with a delayed response, pondering such scrutiny over liquids. You might answer with a question…no, but do you have any solids greater than 4oz? I realize that its possible he won't come over to spend time with me. I’m no longer certain whether she is inside of me or outside of me. He keeps saying he'll only be 10 more minutes by text message, but that was hours ago. Now it’s nearing 5am and the window of opportunity is almost lost. I'm not even sure if its really him anymore sending the texts because they feel more like an automated reminder just to keep me up, keep me waiting, to induce this odd state. “10 more minutes,” then 45 minutes later, “10 more minutes,” then an hour later “10 more minutes.” This is torture. It is not unlike guards who keep their prisoners from falling to sleep with drops of water or with little jolts of electricity once on the hour, every hour. These text messages do this to me, put me in a state of tortured sleep-loss. The sun has begun to sneak into the sky and I already miss the darkness. I know I'll probably only begin to suffer the result of this sleepless night when I’m at work, when I'm called upon to remember the collections data of my boss's most bankrupt clients, the ones who I'm supposed to convince to pay him for work done months ago. I'd rather be trying to convince them to donate to my liquor fund or my refrigerator fund, or just try to get them to pay my rent. Instead, they conveniently leave the country for nine months. My boss's photographs sit in his client's portfolios and they collect dust. The patrons of these designers have run dry of funds. And my boss is no less dependent. The invoice I sent months ago for payment sits in a file cabinet somewhere. But those are all daytime concerns and I have a buffer of four hours before they should even cross my mind. Manet wasn’t the only one who painted Olympia. Other painters liked what he did and they wanted to take it further, to play around with his ideas and use her for their own purposes. One Vol. II. Issue. III 270 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 of these artists was the American born Italian painter, Cy Twombly. His Olympia is strange graffiti on a giant canvas stretching the length of a hall. I saw it in Houston in the Menil Collection. The painting does not depict a person. The fleshy colored spots appear like stains, bloodstains mixed with urine and cum. He writes in charcoal or anything nearby, an available pencil, graphite, or perhaps a sharpened stick dabbed in dust. He writes in an almost illegible script, "Fuck Olympia." He wrote it and people understood. "Fuck Olympia." Smear the blood from a derelict woman’s body, like a dismembered peach. Or worse, from our own self-inflicted knife wounds, expressions of somber disillusionment. Death, Morir. Olympia will crumble, shatter. Something of hers is bursting in a quake of somber violence, unperturbed. Destroy a canvas, destroy a canvas, life is a canvas, morir. Scatological graffiti lingers like traces of abominations, shit on the floor, shit danced upon with violent feet, slipped on, stumbled upon, crashing to the ground from high, high above. Death is a canvas too, a fallen canvas pulled off the erect wall. There is a stage full of mythological ghosts who are scribbled away, painted over, erased. These are the departed gods of classicism, ripped from the canvas and set free like a flock of pigeons who provide a harangue of birdcalls, licking our ears along with sirens and screeching utility. Mechanical ghost cries tear the sound from the canvas, clipping the canvas into an evening gown to house defecation. Under the vast canopy of a canvas there is room to smear the traces of these excretions. Pull them over the fibers to create a big memory of the walls' utility, a place to wipe your hands clean in public. The perceived walls of a city become new walls of a cave, enclosing our memory of bison, and there we spill our own blood for the forgotten creatures and yank them out of our veins, sharing blood on the surface of an art-work. Death, Morir. Olympia lunges into the valley looming like a plague, a million faces in one face, a goddess, a foul goddess to be fucked. This face, this sour face erased, scribbled out, blotted out, forgotten under the trace, the lingering memory was just the ludicrous violent mess-making in feigned lust, a destructive lust to spoil a peach the defecation on a peach, the mistaken peach, rotten. Red as a fresh corpse, Olympia's face is a million fresh corpses, lying in the sunlight where they will dry into a vast artwork, pulled from the precipice to lie flat on the ground, soaking into the soil, sinking into the mud. Fuck a dialectic of high and low or life and death and with each exhale, let a cursing utterance climb up the canvassed walls to infuse them with structural weakness. Whispered 'Fucks', breathy 'shit-heads', yawning 'cunts' aimed at Olympia, the soft fortunate beauty that blinded us into retaliation. Like I said, I saw Twombly’s painting in Houston. This was where my dad received treatment for cancer last Christmas. They had to cut into his skull to reach his sinuses, where the cancer had manifested. It is a matastasizing cancer that will likely spread, but his Radiologist hoped that with this procedure, it would not spread to his brain. I saw Rothko's non-denominational church in Houston, too. It’s a church that is painted all black. When I got back to San Francisco from Houston, I dreamt that everything in my house was painted black, like the Rothko chapel. I was in a room full of people, but I was the only one standing. Everyone else floated waist-high, horizontally, like floating logs, bumping into one another. People's arms and legs rolled towards me, bumping my body, each shaded to the utmost degree. I stood at the center of the room, looking around for someone. I saw my father off in the corner and waded through people to get to him. When I reached him, I tried to lift him into Vol. II. Issue. III 271 September 2011
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