In the Denver-MCA  through the end of May are the “relicts” (relics) of one of Nitsch’s abreactive performances, enacted to liberate the repressive drives in himself and participants in his “aktions.” Instead of film, however, these are Schuttbilder paintings (poured) composed of animal blood and pigment, capturing the gestures and off-body splatters of the original performance.

Part Artaud’s idea of psychoanalytical cure through certain abject formations of theatre, part Golden Bough-type worship and slaughtering of Dionysius, Nitsch’s work is about the trace of an event, not the finished painting. Drips, clots, spatters and smears all attest to a “relic” of a non-repeatable memory or aktion. But the frenzy of the performance is always dictated by the frame: the Nietzschean reintegration of primal and social. This is repeated again in the museum’s display: in the center are a number of Catholic vestments perfectly pressed and placed upon vestibules. But on the walls is the bloodwork, surrounding the repressed pagaentry of transubstantiation, recalling the pagan roots of Christianity, when the blood was never reduced to wine.

Bloodlines: Paintings by Hermann Nitsch is on view at the MCA in Denver until May 29. www.mcadenver.org

Text by Dreux Moreland for Pas Un Autre

The Silver Factory

(Super)Starring:

Andrea Feldman

Ann Buchanan

Bibbe Hansen

Cubism represents objects using elements of their surface geometry but “analytical realists” (Filonov and his students) should represent objects using elements of their inner soul.

He believed that objects and fields should be built up from small details and bits and stated that doing it the other-way-round was nothing short of “charlatanism”. To this end, he worked, and required his students to work, with very small brushes in painting and the finest of points when drawing. No one, however, painted up to Filonov’s stringent standard.

Being one of the last avant-garde artists in the USSR, he died of starvation as Socialist Realism settled into its state-wide reign of aesthetic terror (i.e. a 60+ year buffet of blandness).

But Filonov had the last brushstroke: there was a legend in the Union that Filonov’s ghost protected his art and anybody trying to steal his paintings or to smuggle them abroad would soon die, become paralyzed, or have a similar misfortune.

“There is a 3rd basic way to use the camera – a way that I term “the Transcendence of the Object” – Clarence John Laughlin

“The physical object, to me, is merely a stepping stone to an inner world where the object, with the help of the subconscious drives and focuses perceptions, becomes transmuted into a symbol whose life is beyond the life of the objects we know …”

“Everything, no matter how commonplace and how ugly, has secret meanings. Everything.”

[All images and quotes from Clarence John Laughlin.]

“When Scorpio Rising was — we’ve forgotten, in a sense, that it was a groundbreaker, legally. Because there are only a few flashes of nudity, genitalia, whatever in the film, I mean, they’re very, very short and, if you blink, you won’t even see them. At any rate, when it was shown, at the Cinema — it was called the Cinema on Western Avenue in Hollywood — the premiere run, someone denounced it to the Hollywood vice squad and they raided the theater and took the print. And the case had to go to the California Supreme Court to be freed and then it became, like, a landmark case of redeeming social merit. That was the phrase that was used to justify that it wasn’t pornography. And, indeed, there’s nothing pornographic about it. Somebody had to break the ice and have that kind of case at that time to establish the freedom, because, before then, the police could seize anything they wanted to…” – Kenneth Anger (Excerpt from Interview with Pam Grady)

Bruce Byron worked as a motorcycle messenger in Manhattan. His zodiac sign was Scorpio, and so he called himself that, as well as carrying at all times the scorpion amulet which he is seen kissing and holding in the film. The honorable discharge certificate from the United States Marine Corps, on the wall above his bed, was his own.

[All caps taken from Kenneth Anger's 1964 film Scorpio Rising.]

Download soundtrack HERE.

“It’s a different world in which one must forget the world one inhabits. Villa Santo-Sospir belongs to Madame Alec Weissweiller. It dominates Cape Santo-Sospir, the last point on the map before arriving at Cape Ferrat. The villa is situated on the road to the lighthouse, and its rocks descend to the sea. It looks out on Antibes, Cannes, Nice, and to the right, Villefranche…When I stayed in Santo-Sospir in the summer of 1950 I hastily decorated a wall. Matisse told me that if you decorate one wall, you should do the others as well. He was right. Picasso opened and closed all the doors. All that was left to do was to paint the door.”

“But the doors lead into rooms. The rooms have walls. And if the doors are painted the walls have an empty look…”

“Since being a poet means publicly confiding one’s secrets, better to speak out loud in our sleep.”

“Work does not keep me from an occasional horse ride.”

“Work does not keep me from even riding a lion.”

“Picasso, Matisse, Chagall and myself, on this coast where Renoir used to live, we have tried to defeat the destructive spirit of our time. We have ornamented the surfaces which men dream to demolish. Perhaps the love of our work will protect it from bombs.”

[All quotes and caps from Cocteau's La Villa Santo-Sospir, 1952.]