Now on YouTube!

To support the nomination of the participants to the Happening for the 1998 Turner Prize I commissioned a film of the event. 30 hours of video shot both on the day itself and in the six week lead-up were professionally edited into a twelve minute film which was sent to the Tate Gallery along with the names and addresses of those who had indicated a wish to be nominated by filling in a card. Two minutes had to be cut from the movie in order to get it up on to YouTube. Not an easy task by any means but it had to be done. You will find it here.

I was not eligible myself for the Turner Prize because there is an age limit of 50. We did not make it to the short list. The reason, I maintain, was that they did not want to invite us all to the traditional dinner that they give to those lucky ones when the short list is announced. Doubtless our partners would also have been invited and they would have needed nearly 800 prawn cocktails. And that’s just for starters.

The movie has a sub-plot provided by a an American Film Library who chose that same day to send a unit to the bridge to update their stock footage. This is done, it would appear, once every ten years. I would dearly like to know what happened next, there.

I am hoping that it will be possible, one day, to produce a full-length documentary about the Happening and will be happy to make my footage available to a TV production company for that purpose. It was, in all truth, a very special event. Unique in Art, unique in the history of London Bridge and memorable for everyone who walked across the bridge that day. Even for those who attempted not to get involved. I say “attempted” because it is in the nature of a Happening that those who do not participate but are there when it happens are a part of it, whether they like it or not. The YouTube video will do more than bring back the moment. It also shows how we looked eleven years ago. Scary!

There is more about the Happening here.

My next posting will be a Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark, formerly Kenneth Clark (and, by whatever name, of blessed memory) and his book The Nude. Like all my postings on erotic art it will Astonish and Amaze you. Not for the genius and wit of the writing but because you will be filled with wonder that anyone can extract so much prurient spin out of a dusty old place like the National Gallery.

There is a sub-agenda to my decision to put up a longish piece about Lord Clark. Writing about erotic art on a non-anonymous web site is like getting glue on your hands that you will never be able to be get off. At 78 it does not matter as much as it would if one were forty years younger but even so the thought often crosses my mind: Should I be doing this?

So far, believe it or not, I have been holding back on some of the more extreme stuff. But as we get deeper into the subject we will be pushing at the boundaries of the literature of erotic art and I am not sure whether we (me, and you, and others visiting this web site) will be ready for it.

Lord Clark, who had a long innings as Director of the National Gallery, was as one with my view that there is nothing to be ashamed of in getting an erotic fix out of a painting of a naked woman and it was his view that if there was not an erotic fix there was something wrong with the painting. He would not have gone along with my view that it is only the paintings with an erotic content that are worth looking at, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

Which brings me back to the National Gallery. I called it, just a moment ago, a dusty old place. In all fairness to the Gallery this needs to be qualified. 90 per cent of the pictures in its collection are (metaphorically speaking) dusty old pictures but when I popped in last week to check out the Horrible Hogarth’s Marriage a La Mode paintings the place was fairly buzzing. It was hardly possible to make one’s way through the rooms without tripping over girls sitting on the floor drawing pictures on the walls and everywhere there were groups of people being told by lecturers why they should marvel at some other (dusty old) picture on the wall.

I got that strange feeling that one always gets when one looks at a familiar image from a book or a newspaper or the television and then sees the real thing. If it is a celebrity he or she always looks smaller than one had imagined. The Hogarth pictures looked very small by comparison with the image that had lodged in my mind and another odd thing is that the reproductions tend to be more colourful and more revealing of the fine detail than the actual pictures themselves. Then something stopped me abruptly in my tracks, as the saying goes. The six Marriage al La Mode paintings are at the right hand end of a long wall which then turns through 90 degrees to become a short wall up to an entrance door. On the short 90 degree return I suddenly came face to face with Hogarth’s famous The Shrimp Girl. I looked at her and I said “I know your secret.” I think she blushed.

When she saw what she had done she went to the Tate and gave its Fontana rubbish forty one. I wish.

This posting began life in the early hours of a cold and rainy November Sunday as a sort of place holder for my forthcoming Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark and his justly famous book The Nude. The text of the Gloss is already finished and it awaits only completion of the illustrations. I take a lot of trouble over the illustrations and usually encapsulate the captions with the image using Adobe Illustrator software. Sometimes it takes as long to do the illustrations as it does the text. I think the extra effort worthwhile because a site like this not only has its regular visitors, it is a destination for folk searching on a particular art subject. The pictures will be what is looked at first and if you are trying to put over a message (which is what blogging is all about) you need to start there. Anyway, that’s what I think.

In the coming Glossary Gloss there is a discussion of dehanchement which is Lord Clark’s word for contrapposto. I refer to the discovery by me and Ian Tovey that the horizontally dehanched Rokeby Venus (by Velazquez, pride of the National Gallery) retains its allure when rearranged vertically. The illustration here comes from The Count and the Widow, a feature of this web site somewhat neglected in the past few weeks but still very much an on-going enterprise. As a place holder ornament I thought it would do nicely. And that, I thought, was that.

Then, during a waking-up tour of various issues surrounding my life, it occurred to me that I have a lot of stuff on the Rokeby Venus, written and not published, which made it worthy of an Art Note in its own right. This is it.

There may be no single painting in the National Gallery of which more has been written and whose image is more indelibly impressed on the minds of art lovers than the Velazquez Rokeby Venus. Some people call the painting the Toilet of Venus and some people call it Venus at her Mirror but by whatever it name the picture goes the erotic waves pulsing from it can not be ignored. As I like to point out at every possible opportunity, the ultimate accolade came at the beginning of an hour long television programme devoted exclusively to this painting by the British Broadcasting Corporation early in 2003. It opened with the immortal words “The most smackable bum in western art.”

The pose - which shows only a rear view of the lady, her face reflected in a mirror - has naturally given rise to speculation as to what she would look like from the other side. Might she, like some other famous Venus’s in art, be pleasuring herself? The expression on her face says she might well be, but from what we can see of her left arm she would have to be double jointed for her left hand to be actively employed. More likely the obverse, as a numismatist would term it, would show a royal flush of cleft, breast and nipples. All laid out on a black silk sheet ground.

I sometimes wonder if the National Gallery warders (which is what the Gallery calls it Old Master minders), in a counter-boredom strategy, allow their minds to dwell at unhealthy length on what may be the view from the other side. Unwittingly, if there is anything in the theory that the Rokeby Venus is not one but two works of art, they will be exposing themselves to subliminal imagery in which sex is combined with violence .

To begin at the beginning. The Rokeby Venus was painted by the Spanish Court Artist Diego Velazquez somewhere around 1650. It is what I call Velazquez’s Snow Knight (see here in the Glossary) because there is nothing nearly comparable to it in the rest of his considerable output. Velazquez was working in an ultra-religious enclave untouched by the blast of Renaissance liberalism blowing through the rest of Europe. No one knows who the lady was and with Spanish Inquisition spies everywhere the painting could only have been displayed privately. A less likely start in life for one of the most outstanding examples of the nude genre of all time cannot be imagined. Snow Knight, it will be recollected, was a horse who had never won a decent race in his life and would never do so again and started in the Derby as a rank outsider. (The odds of 50 to 1 were the bookies mugging the punters.) The horse led the field from start to finish. The odds against Velazquez producing the Rokeby Venus were 5000 to 1.

Snow Knight returned to obscurity but fame and fortune awaited the Velazquez painting. In 1814, having at one time been owned by the Duchess of Alba (herself famous for being painted with and without clothes by Goya), it was purchased by the Squire of Rokeby Hall, Yorkshire. At this point the painting acquired the name by which it is popularly known. At Rokeby, according to the BBC, the painting was hung over the fireplace but well above the eyeline of the ladies so as not to embarrass them. Hogarth, doubtless, would have hung it behind a curtain with one foot poking out.

The purchase by the National Gallery of the Rokeby Venus in 1905 represented a major milestone in the history of the National Gallery and a victory for the National Art Collections Fund that had been formed two years earlier in an attempt to prevent the exodus of national art treasures to wealthy overseas buyers. It immediately became the flag ship painting in the National Gallery’s collection.

Lucio Fontana

In 1905 Lucio Fontana, aged 6 and son of an Italian sculptor, arrived in Milan from Argentina where he had been born. In the years leading up to the second World War he acquired a reputation as an abstract artist producing large quantities of abstract ceramics and abstract sculptures. He spent the war years, 1940-6, in Buenos Aires further enhancing his avant-guarde credentials and providing further evidence that, whatever else could be said about him, he was not stupid. Between 1947, back in Italy, Fontana issued a series of manifestos on the subject of spatialism in which he rejected easel painting in favour of art that would “transcend the area of the canvas.” Sometime around 1950 Fontana established as his speciality works comprised of holes in plain coloured canvas. In 1958, in a move that was to make his name famous across the world of art, he replaced the holes by slits. The slit canvases and bronzes are considered to be the culmination of a conception of art that regards it as a record of action and gesture. It is an area in which Fontana is considered to have been a pioneer. There is, however, a persuasive case for saying that a suffragette called Mary Richardson got there before him.

Mary Richardson

The lone voice that attests to Mary Richardson’s place as the true founder of spatial art is a young Danish artist called Lisa Rosenmeier. Ms Rosenmeier is an artist who uses museums, the Internet and the mass media to present viewers with what she describes as suggestive, many-layered congnitive spaces in which the viewer is involved both mentally and physically. It would do Ms Rosenmeier a great injustice to say that this sounds reminscent of slits in canvas because, unlike Fontana who made a career of goosing the gullible and never produced anything worthwhile, she has produced a quite remarkable web site in which she employs state of the art web technology to tell the story of Mary Richardson’s happening at the National Gallery on 10th March 1914. If the web site is typical of her work Ms Rosenmeier is certainly someone to watch.

Mary Richardson was a militant suffragette who went up to the painting of the glass framed Rokeby Venus as it hung in the National Gallery and without warning produce a meat chopper hidden in her muff with which she attacked the painting. On hearing the sound of breaking glass a police officer who was at the door to the room and a gallery attendant rushed towards her but before they could seize her she had made seven large cuts on that part of the canvas on which Venus’ naked back and bottom were painted. The picture was, says Ms Rosenmeier, the victim of one of the most dramatic art actions in modern times.

The situation that had made Mary Richardson flip was the increasingly savage conflict between the suffragette movement and the government of the day. The struggle by women to obtain the vote had been gathering momentum since before the turn of the Century. Under Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst’s leadership women who were arrested for disrupting meetings and other kinds of disorder refused to be fined and chose imprisonment instead. Once imprisoned they went on hunger strike. The authorities responded by force-feeding, a brutal process which inevitable led to a public outcry. On June 4th 1913 Emily Davison threw herself under the King Edward VII’s racehorse Amner as it rounded Tattenham Corner in the Epsom Derby and was killed. (Amner, it may be noted, was third from last at the time – which is around where the eventual winner is usually to be found. One of the greatest ever Derby jockeys, Harry Wragg, was known as “the Head Waiter.)

Nine months passes and as Mary Richardson is making her way towards the Rokeby Venus clutching her hidden meat chopper Mrs Pankhurst is again in prison and on hunger strike. On her arrest Mary Richardson tells the police: “They are killing Mrs Pankhurst. You can get another picture, but you cannot get a life.”

Mary Richardson’s strategy, says Ms Rosenmeier anticipated some of the formal features explored by happening artists and by Fontana. She succeeded both in transforming the beautiful Venus from aesthetic object to murder victim and in transforming woman’s position in art from passive to active, from the role of model to that of actor. But first and foremost she ripped the canvas in order to expand the concept of beauty in a work of art from the “aesthetic” to the “ethical”, and thereby also to encompass justice, equality and women’s suffrage.”

First she crushes the glass with a meat axe, says Ms Rosenmeier. Then she penetrates the canvas with a sharp object. First a short slash, then long slashes placed with extreme precision. This new artistic strategy is a settlement of accounts with the tradition that has dominated painting since the Renaissance, in which illusion or trompe l’oeil is used to create spatiality. Mary Richardson does not wish to paint the illusion of space but to create real spaces. By shattering its framework she has given painting a third dimension.

Although Mary Richardson would have been unaware that she was putting down a marker for a place in the history of art she might have appreciated the connection which is often made between Fontana’s slits and the female vagina. Daniel Cottom, Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, places them in a direct line with Courbet’s Origin of the World, Hans Bellmer’s Poupees and Cindy Sherman’s photographs of grotesque anatomical models - all of which were equipped with between-the-leg orifices. And in 1995, when the Pompidou Centre in Paris mounted its mega sex art show Femininmasculin: The Sex of Art, the front page picture in Libération was illustrated by a photograph of the Lucio Fontana exhibit which the Associated Press report described as “an abstract vagina - a black slit painted on white canvas.”

The difference between Mary Richardson’s artistic creation and Fontana’s oeuvre was that her’s was the action of a woman moved by what she perceived as a great injustice whereas all that Fontana ever set out to do was impregnate the world’s cultural heritage with holes and slits, with money passing. Mary Richardson’s action, by contrast and in Ms Rosenmeier’s words, touched upon the most essential problems of work in 20th century art history “not least the interference of the painting with space”. Comparisons, she says, place spatialism - articulated by Fontana - on a lower plane. Ms Rosenmeier’s article is here.

Be all this as it may, Mary Richardson left the Rokeby Venus with not one but seven slits and, even though the painting has been carefully repaired, the slits are still faintly visible. If there is anything in the aura theory (that there is something special about an original work of art that a reproduction just does not have) this painting must be as lethal an example of vagina dentata as any that can be imagined. The National Gallery’s warders should be beware.

“Vagina dentata” means a penis-eating woman and has little currency outside of the world of art. It is a subject for another day. It comes in a package with the Guerrilla Girls and with what Camilia Paglia calls “uppity women”, the Dwork, et al.

I have a huge admiration for the suffragettes. In another life I was what was known as an anti-smoking activist. I never quite saw myself as that, but it is what the newspapers called me in the three parliamentary by-elections that I contested. To this day, whenever I see teenage girls smoking so that the tobacco companies can make money, I wonder where their mothers are. Why are they not standing outside the offices of the tobacco companies? They could echo Mary Richardson’s words when she got arrested. “You are killing our children. You can find another way to make money, but you cannot get a life.”

You will find a clue to Kermit the Frog’s Great Art Mystery Quiz in the Glossary definition of Art here .

While I continue to concentrate most of my efforts on a A Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery (publisher wanted) my other book project, Anatomy of Titillation, is never far from my mind. The recent Glossary Gloss on the Decima Four (here) with its superb - Best in Gallery - Pohlenburg bottom reminded me that I had decided, some time ago, to utilise the Baubo imagery to demonstrated how the naked female form can be made to engage the erotic senses more powerfully by the addition of clothing. The degree of enhancement depending on the extent and type of clothing and how it is arranged and what ideas are triggered in the mind of the viewer.

The Baubo story first appeared on this web site here and was continued here. I have done some work on the Baubo illustration to make it ready for application, paperdoll fashion, to other portrayals of the female nude. In Art Notes 6 we will see what the effect of skirt-lifting is on such images, beginning with the National Gallery’s Pohlenburg lady.

The principal book on the nude in art is by the late Kenneth Clark. It is called The Nude and there ought not to be any student of the history of art who has not read it. Kenneth Clark, later Lord Clark, has his own entry in the Glossary and whenever referred to in my writing is given the appellation “of blessed memory” - a phrase that I do not use lightly. Once you start dressing-up nude paintings to see what the effect is you are getting into deep psychology and I need to have Lord Clark close upsides when I venture into what can be very tricky territory. I will therefor put up a Glossary Gloss on Lord Clark before I do anything else. The entry in the Glossary is under the name of his famous book and is here.

My next posting in the matter of Samuelson, Anthony v. Hogarth, the Horrible H. is 95% complete and I hope to put it up on the site within the next seventy-two hours. The second picture in the National Gallery’s Marriage a La Mode six-pack, Tete a Tete, has now been seen off, thankfully, and the coming posting will deal with the third picture, The Inspection. It will not turn into a long running saga like the second picture did.

In the course of putting the illustrations together for The Inspection I looked around for something to highlight the similarity between the grisly German Death and the Maiden genre of erotic art and the Horrible Hogarth’s near in flagrante Skeleton and Ecorche which form part of the decor of the doctor’s consulting room which is the scene of the third picture. I think that “near” would have been superfluous but for the fact that there is no bone in a man’s penis. If there had been, it is doubtful whether Hogarth would have been able to resist the temptation of having the male skeleton buggering the skinless ecorche.

We are all assuming, by the way, that the skeleton in Plate III is indeed that of a man. It could turn out to belong to a woman. Ms Egerton (who wrote the National Gallery’s book of the show) has a line to the medical profession that she was able to use to check out the symptoms and treatment of syphilis. I hope that she will ask for their opinion on the gender of the skeleton. If it is male skeleton doing the kissing and the groping the popular conclusion that Hogarth is making some kind of statement about homosexuality would not be unreasonable. The ecorche looks certainly to be male on account of being notably flat chested. Whatever criticisms can be levied against Hogarth, he can not be accused of being scared of drawing a breast. His work teems with dropped necklines and exposed nipples. But if the skeleton should turn out to be a female it would be a whole new ball game (no pun intended).

In Death and the Maiden pictures there is often quite a lot of groping going on. However, it is always Death who is doing the groping and the Maiden (young, lush and naked) is always on the receiving end. To turn the tables and have the woman (albeit a skeleton) feeling up the man (albeit one that has no skin) and taking over the traditional male role of Death would have the feminists (Juno and Andrea Dworkin’s ghost among them) in ecstasy. The headline in the Olympius Mountain Times would read: “Underworld’s glass ceiling shattered!” Come to think of it, I would not put it past the Dwork to have seen off the old git with the scythe.

It was not difficult to find a Death and the Maiden image to accompany the Hogarth clip but it was not easy to choose from among them. Here are some of the rejects.

The National Gallery has a painting by Puvis de Chavannes entitled Death and the Maidens, note the plural. If I left it there I would have everyone thinking that this must be a swinging version of the story with the ladies climbing all over Death in a climactic orgy and the National Gallery would be wondering what had brought the crowds in.

Sad to say, nothing could be further from the truth. Firstly we have only got a rough sketch, not the finished art, which is in Massachusettes. Much good it may do them. Death is crashed out on the ground and the six ladies are posing in neck-to-toe nighties. Loose fitting nighties.

The National Gallery has three other works by the same artist. One of them is a decapitation picture entitled the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. As remarked in a previous posting, the public likes nothing better than a decapitation picture and, true to form, the Gallery mounted an exhibition around this painting. It was back in 2002 and I seem to remember seeing in a newspaper at the time an Xray photograph of the painting which was part of the show which revealed that the artist had originally painted Salome in the nude leaving nothing to the imagination. I do not have a note about this, much less a copy of the Xray photo, but it is not something that I am likely to mis-recollect.

The National Gallery has another picture by Puvis de Chavannes of interest. It is called A Maid combing a Woman’s Hair and there are a pair of world class breasts on display. The Decima Four never got a look at them because the picture has been on loan to the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin since 1979. The National Gallery should get it back. Aside from the fact that it is our painting, and it falls into a category where we are very thin on the ground, last time I was in Dublin there were gypsies breast feeding babies in the street. Dubliners must surely be so familiar with the sight of a bared breast as to be completely de-sensitised.

A digitised version of the captions to the illustrations will be found on the ARTISTS ILLUSTRATED page.

In the second lot of Art Notes, posted last week, I extracted from my Filemaker Index to Internet Downloads entries relating to Baubo, sometimes called the “Goddess of Laughter” and sometimes called “The Skirt Lifter”. She has been elected to the office of Logo to Art Notes, so it is only fitting that she is the subject of an Art Note in her own right. In the following references the first number is the number of the Internet Download volume, the second is the page number in that volume, not that it matters. In this note I am trying to show, in a practical way, how my data base works.

043/007: Leads to an August 2002 download from www.paleothea.com. This is a site devoted to “Women in Mythology”. There are thousands of them and a significant proportion of them have erotic connections. The artists of the Renaissance gleefully celebrated their liberation from the Dark Ages by portraying them at every opportunity but Baubo was an exception. A short Baubo entry tells how she was able to get Demeter, the Goddess of the Harvest, out of the depression into which she plunged following the abduction of her daughter Persephone. Demeter shared her misery with the rest of the world by giving it its first winter. Baubo got Demeter to laugh by flashing her and Spring came soon after.

The Paleothea site is still going strong and better than ever and it makes a blogger-come-lately like me feel very humble.

048/096: This is a fematudinous blurb written in curatorial gobble-de-gook for a gallery exhibition of the work a Californian collage artist called Lynn Bennett which took place in 1999. The show was called “Baubo, the goddess of obscenity” and its not especially USP was Baubo’s legacy of the “idea that womankind’s happiness and enjoyment of themselves is integral to a balanced terrestrial existence.” From the web site www.lynnbennett.com/ it look’s like the girl’s done good although I could not find any sign of her dalliance with Baubo.

The same Filemaker reference leads to a print-out of page 1 of a Google search against the word “baubo” that I made on 26 August 2002 recording 2,510 hits. The same search today produces 85,200 hits – an increase of 3,400%. To assess how much of the increased number of hits is due to increased traffic on the Internet it is necessary to compare the result against then-and-now searches for another broadly comparable (which is to say obscure combined with erotic) word. The only “control” as I think it should be called that I have available is “fricatrice” which on 21 August 2002 scored google 69 hits and today results in 2,490 hits, an increase of 3,600%. Baubo’s fifteen minutes of celebrity, it seems, must still lie in the future. She does, however, have a pillow named after her (see left).

Digressing for a moment, “Fricatrice” is an old word which originally meant a prostitute specialising in masturbation. It comes from the Latin fricare meaning “to rub”. Later it was used to describe any lewd woman and lesbians. Later still it fell into disuse. I came across it in Sir Richard Francis Burton’s notes on his 1885 translation of The Arabian Nights – the publication of which was one of the greatest achievements of the Internet. Apparently frication was something for which Jewish harlots in biblical times were particularly well known. Highly creditable, if true, since it would allow them to do the business without risk to their health.

Sir Richard Francis Burton is sure to get a mention when I get to Ruskin the Turner Burner. Like Turner, some of Burton’s work succumbed posthumously to the attentions of a small minded arsonist. The Burton Burner was his widow.

094/026 My index entry - “Baubo - touching underside of breasts” – summarises a downloaded account of how the boy Lackhos, accompanying his mother Demeter when she meets Baubo, reaches up and touches the undersides of Baubo’s breasts. Thinking that this might be a pointer to the super erotic status accorded to this part of a woman’s anatomy – per “The Judge and Jennifer Aniston” mentioned in a previous posting here. – I did a follow-up google at 122/106 but it proved a dead-end.

221/088 “Baubo, Leicester City Football dirty dancing case, Sheilah-Na-Gigs” intrigued me when it caught my eye a few days ago. I couldn’t for the life of me remember what the “Leicester City Football dirty dancing case” was about and what it could possibly have to do with art. Laying between “Baubo” and “Sheilah-Na-Gigs” it was like the filling in a sandwich. The connection between the first and the last with each other and with art is very well known. The Sheilah-Na-Gigs were small Celtic fertility carvings above the doors of Medieval churches characterised by spread legs and massively disproportionate vulvas. More given to lust than laughter but, as self - exhibitionists - often bracketed with Baubo. As might be expected, Dr Ernest Martin, who saw them as having been put in place by Satan to distract the faithful from their prayers, had a lot to say about them. Article about the Doc here.

While it had something to do with art (or my approach to art) the Leicester City affair turns out to have had nothing to do with Baubo and the little Celtic stone strumpets. So it should have been separately indexed. At that time I was writing about a little known art metaphor which has been given the name “slung leg”. It was a device adopted during the Renaissance to indicate copulation without actually showing it.

While my head was filled with slung legs a huge story broke in the British tabloid newspaper News of the World about three Leicester City footballers who had been thrown into jail in the Spanish resort La Manga on charges of violent rape against three happily married ladies on holiday from Germany. In some mysterious fashion the News of the World had come by an exclusive photograph of one of the footballers dancing with one of the ladies in the Hyatt Regency Casino Bar prior to the alleged incident. The juxtaposition of the dancers looked to me very like a slung leg and, while intercourse was obviously not taking place there in the hotel bar, there was, I thought, an indication that it was not unlikely to occur not very far away and in the near future. It is always useful to obtain a present day confirmation that our forbears, without the scientific resources and accumulated wisdom that have fallen to us, nevertheless got it right. In the event the forensic evidence showed that sex had not taken place and the three footballers were acquitted. Today’s reality versus forbears: One – Nil. (On this occasion.)

229/001 This entry embraces five downloaded articles spread over 32 pages in which one thing led to another. The first item is about the Vesica Piscis (from the Latin: “Fish Bladder”) and the “sacred geometry” represented by the pointed Gothic arch and mandorla shapes. It covers much the same ground as Doc Martin does but comes from the opposite side with the view that the symbolism is wholly excellent referring as it does to the womb of the Blessed Virgin. Moreover the Gothic shape, says the writer, is better able to cope with architectural stresses than a round shape. If true (and it has the ring of truth) it did not need Satan to make it the design choice of church builders for nearly a thousand years.

Next article in this group of downloads is about Glastonbury where Gothic symbolism, apparently, is living cheek by jowl and on friendly terms with all kinds of pagan influences. The landscape of Glastonbury represents the Primordial Great Mother, the village of Stonedown is the head of the goddess, the Tor is her left breast, Chalice Hill her pregnant belly and so on until we get to the town of Street where her foot sinks into the ground. It is hardly necessary to say that Glastonbury Abbey, site apparently of the first Christian Church in Britain, is situated bang slap in the Primordial Great Mother’s vagina.

Next up is a short piece about the Sheilah-Na-Gigs. The author of the piece thinks that the name (which everyone agrees has, of itself, no convincing Gaelic associations) comes from Mesopotamia where it approximately translates as “sacred harlot”. I think it more like to have come from Australia.

After this comes a download from an American bible site wanting to correct misinformation put out by atheists that the fish symbol is of pagan origin. Not so, they say. It comes from the disciples’ role as “fishers of men”.

We have now reached page 23 in volume 229 and it is the turn of the American Atheists with an article headed True Origin of Christian “Fish” Symbol Might Outrage, Shock Jesus Worshippers. Down the right hand side of the web page are links to articles with names that are less of a mouthful like: “Daniel in the Debunker’s Den”, “How Jesus Got a Life” and “Biblical Contradictions”. Not only did the Christians pinch the fish from the Pagans says the author, but they adopted it as the shape for a bishop’s mitre.

What must have been the best part of a day trawling the Internet for Vesica Piscis references ended on an up-beat note with a site headed: Yoni Affirmations. “Yoni,” this download begins, “means SACRED ALTAR and is slang for women’s genitals.” The introductory paragraph continues for a 150 words or so and concludes: This is not a porn page, it is not a “sex” page. It is a page about women’s rights to pride in their body parts, the right to be freed of imagery of slugs and tuna fish. The right to LOVE our genitals.”

In a past existence I held a publican’s licence and I remember some graffiti in the men’s toilet that read: “If girls are made of sugar and spice, why do they taste of anchovies?” (I also remember something written in the women’s toilet: “When God made man She was joking.”). The Yoni piece runs to seven pages and is illustrated with vulva designed puppets and pillows. There are also pictures of Baubo and Sheilah Na Gigs “the two goddesses of the Vulva”. There are links to books on women’s genitals including Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio and The Cunt Colouring Book by Tee Corine and to Annie Sprinkle. I have stuff on Inga Muscio and Annie Sprinkle. The last named does an act which she calls A Public Cervix Announcement in which members of the audience are invited up on to the stage to inspect her cervix through a speculum with the help of a flash light.

The thing about writing a Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery and an Anatomy of Titillation is that you never know when some snippet of information culled from the World Wide Web may come in useful. There is a lot of fishy imagery on view in the Gallery’s religious paintings. And Gothic arches and Bishop’s mitres are sprinkled on canvases like salt and vinegar on fish and chips. When I reach the point of putting forward helpful suggestions for the Gallery to increase its rapport with ordinary (tax-paying) folk I will suggest that they put on sale a range of yoni-ish puppets and cushions in their shop. I am minded to offer to lay off the fishy references in the Judeo-Christian collection in exchange for their agreeing to offer an Artist in Residency to Annie Sprinkle and another to Carolee Schneemann whose Interior Scroll act, in which she draws a long feminist diatribe from her vagina, never fails to draw rapturous applause.

Like the late Andrea Dworkin (”the Dwork” mentioned in earlier postings and defined in the glossary) Sprinkle and Schneemann are both Jewish. Likewise, Judy Chicago, designer of The Dinner Party, a 39 piece place setting in which the plates resemble vaginas. Dworkin and Sprinkle both worked as prostitutes for a time before achieving fame in the world of art. Those old Yiddisher fricatrixes sitting by the dusty, baking hot, North African road side waiting for custom would have been proud of us. Since she seems not to have any Jewish ancestry Inga Muscio is the odd woman out. But I would let her in, if she asks.

It was on a sudden whim that I decided to use Baubo as an identifying icon for my series of Art Notes harvested from nine years of research across the literature of art. If you are writing about art what better patron can you have than the Goddess of Laughter?

I have three digital resources. My first port of call will always be my FilemakerPro “Internet Download” file. When I find something of interest on the Internet I will print it off in a hard copy. The hard copies are bound together with treasury tags in numbered volumes of around 125 pages and the pages are numbered. The volume numbers started at 001 and the most recent volume is numbered 341. I read the printed hard copies and mark in the margin anything that I think has a bearing on either of my two projected books which are, of course, A Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery and an Anatomy of Titillation. I then make an entry into the “Internet Download” File which briefly captures the thrust of the printed downloaded article and includes keywords to make it searchable. Searching for “Baubo” produces the following sightings. More, as a matter of fact, than I had anticipated.

043/007 Baubo the skirt lifter
048/096 Baubo gobbledegook (and p 97 - 100 incl Baubo Google) (& p 126)
094/026 Baubo - touching underside of breasts.
122/106 Aniston sides/undersides google search (see also Baubo)
221/088 Baubo, Leicester City Football dirty dancing case .Baubo and Sheila-Na-Gigs
229/001 Vesica Piscis (mandorla) and pointed Gothic arch p2, glastonbury p 4, venus of Willendorf, ditto Laussel p 6, v p = yoni p 8, Sheila-Na-Gog [ 17, fish = goddess Ephesus (fish amulet covering genitals) fish swallowed penis of Osiris, = vulva of Isis, p 19, [repaeated p 23] Yoni pride, image of slugs and tuna fish p 25, Baubo p 30,
250/001 Achilles daughters Lycomedes, Dian Acteon p 2, Andromeda p 4, Angelica p 7, Angelica hermit p 8, Temptation St Anthony p 9, antiope p 10, Apelles alexander campaspe p 11, aristotle campaspe p 12, Augustine arousal p 12a, avengers leather p 13, baby doll p 14. Whore of Babylon p 15, Barbarella orgasmatron p 16, Baubo skirt p 17, Baubo demeter p 19, Benjamites concubine p 21, Brennus p 22, Jupiter & Callisto p 23, candaules p 25, Catherine Siena foreskin p 26, Aurora Cephalus p 29, Cimon Iphigenia p 30,
255/007 Clement of Alexandria, 43 page rant, Venus ex Uranus virilia could not get enough of them p 36, Baubo p 38, Eleusinian mysteries p 38, Dionysus in Hades sodomized p 43, Pygmalion and cnidian Aphrodite p 87,
313/083 Indian Prince makes metal tube to protect his penis, Norse goddess Hel ruled over Hell, gateway lined with teeth and looking like female genitalia p 84, Maori Maui attempting to achieve immortality by crawling though Hine-nui-te-po’s vagina while asleep (the goddess of death). Anti rape devices p 88,89, vagina Dentata p91, helheim vagina per Google p94, cunti goddess per google p 96, vulva puppets p 98-103, Baubo stuff p104, orange = womb chakra p 107, Vagina fish smell per Google p 111, pantie sniffer p115,
313/104 Baubo skirt lifter ana-suromai, She speaks from between her legs, Dice entre las piernas, Baubo is cunctipotent??? orange = womb chakra p 107,

As you can see, I have accumulated a fair amount of stuff on this lady over the years.

But when I consult my second FilemakerPro data base (which is called “Supercombo” because it contains everything I have ever written on art up till now, regardless of the fact that it has never seen a publisher) I find that she has never crossed my keyboard. This may be because there is no direct connection between the National Gallery and Baubo and because she never caught the attention of the Old Masters. An indicator of how tunnel visioned those guys were. Or it may be Renaissance age-ism because in some tellings of Baubo’s shameless conduct in the presence of the Goddess Demeter she is an old crone. I, for my part, have never failed to make a note when Baubo jumped out of the computer screen because skirt lifting (whether or not intentional) has significant connotations for an Anatomy of Titillation. I have always known that Baubo will come in useful one day.

For images I use the normal search facility on my Mac (Command F) which brings up every image I have ever downloaded. Command F produces only two versions of Baubo, the pencil drawing that I am using as the badge for these articles and a sculpted version on the right. This paucity of internet imagery is another sign that Baubo is definitely a C-list celebrity - whether in art or mythology.

I will have a look at what I have got on Baubo and report back to you in my next posting. At the same time, I shall re-google her and see if there is anything new. Meantime, cast your eyes over the bronze Baubo. Is she truly naked under her skirt? Or is that Bridget Jones knickers that she has got on?

Bicycle Art
Ascii Art
Pr0n
Gutai Group
Googling erotic art

So I’m having my supper and clicking the remote and wandering around Sky Movies to see if there is anything to watch while I’m eating. The only thing I can find is a 1963 TCM movie called The Wheeler Dealers. It has already been going for half an hour and seems to be about a woman trying to make it as a stockbroker. The stars are James Garner and Lee Remick. Nice looking but icy. She is no one’s turn-on, I would think. Anyway, there is this sequence that has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot where one of the characters visits an artist who is doing a bicycle painting.

Bicycle painting is something that I have notes about for use in a future article. The point I want to make being that it is as much a way of producing art as most Abstract/Expressionist painters do it. (See definitions of “Art” and “Scam Art” in my Glossary.) Since painting with a bicycle is not in itself very erotic it does not fit in with my Guide to Erotic Art in the National Gallery project but in my mind it equates to Jackson Pollack’s dipstick art in which he daubed the paint on to the canvas with his penis and the thought of that surely must be erotic to some people.

In 1958, while still a student at the RCA, William Green came into the public eye for his painterly biking. In 1961 Tommy Hancock had a bicycle art moment in his film The Rebel and two years later we have the Hollywood version. But William Green did it for real and that made him something of a hero for me because I saw him as not so much an artist as someone who was outing a naked Emperor. Which is what I try to do.

Googling “bicycle”, “art” and “william green” brings up 654 hits, not all of them for Biker Green the Artist. One of them is from an art reference site (here) under an entry for Action Art.

This term, first coined by Harold Rosenberg, refers to the dribbling, splashing or otherwise unconventional techniques of applying paint to a canvas. Connected to the Abstract Expressionist movement, but more precise in its meaning, Action Painting believes in the expressive power held in the actual act of painting as much as in the finished product. Rosenberg defined the notion of the canvas as seen by the artists in this movement as being ‘not a picture but an event’.

Jackson Pollock was the leading figure of the movement, employing the ‘drip’ technique to create his vast paint splattered canvases. There is some debate as to how much he left to chance and how much the finished product reflected his original intentions, but the power of his works lies in their energy and sheer drama.

Other artists produced Action Paintings often employing quite unconventional techniques. The British painter William Green, for example, rode a bicycle over his canvas, while one of the Gutai Group in Japan painted with his feet as he hung from a rope. Critics were divided over the worth and purpose of this movement as for every Pollock there were numerous examples of over-indulgence and derisive imitations. In retrospect, however, it stands as an important aspect of Abstract Expressionism and it can be seen as a precursor to many later techniques such as Spin Art.

My Internet Download notes on Bicycle Art take me to Ascii Art (an art genre devoted to using dots and dashes, letters and numbers) a sub-species of which uses the Ascii alphabet to represent bicycles. I would say that Ascii Art at its best and when it is combined with animation verges on genius. Much better, to my thinking, than anything Jackson Pollock was able to achieve with his penis. There is a web site with a lot of Ascii stuff on it here.

I particularly like one of the animations that shows a “man doing finger” both because digitus impudicus is something that features in my National Gallery research and because an animated finger strikes me as being something that would be very useful in contentious email correspondence.

When I first encountered Ascii it was still the province of repressed computer programmers who wanted to use the internet for sexual gratification but were constrained by the lack of bandwidth. Unable to upload or download the juicy photographs that we now take for granted they devised a method of erotic depiction using the Ascii softwear programming code. They called it Ascii Pr0n. When I first came across Ascii Pr0n in early 2003 it seemed to be in its death throws but google the two words today and you get three quarters of a million sightings so it has gone from strength to strength in the intervening period. “Pr0n” instead of “Porn” was apparently some kind of geek in-joke. Pr could stand for prick, I suppose, and 0 could stand for you know what and n could stand for in. But I think it more likely that there is a binary explanation. As seems to be the case with the original Ascii version of digitus impudicus – 00100 - It certainly works visually. Other Pr0n images here.The trick with this last link is, when you get to the site, click on the lady ruffling her hair. This wll bring up more Ascii pin-ups than you you would ever have thought possible.

Ascii artists use a variety of characters to produce light and dark areas. Humour sometimes creeps in. One pin-up artist lettered the nipples respectively A and B. Another, whether deliberately or not I do not know, uses the characters YMMY in the eroginous areas. Here is a detail from the bottom left pin-up in the montage above.

I had never before heard of the Gutai Group (mentioned in the Action Art quote above) but they seem to have been a lot of fun. I googled “gutai group” and found that the Tate Gallery has a piece on them in its Glossary:

Japanese avant-garde group. Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association) was formed in 1954 in Osaka by Yoshihara Jiro, Kanayma Akira, Murakami Saburo, Shiraga Kazuo, and Shimamoto Shozo. The word has been translated into English as ‘embodiment’ or ‘concrete’. Yoshihara was an older artist around whom the group coalesced and who financed it. In their early public exhibitions in 1955 and 1956 Gutai artists created a series Pr0n of striking works anticipating later Happenings and Performance and Conceptual art. Shiraga’s Challenge to the Mud 1955, in which the artist rolled half naked in a pile of mud, remains the most celebrated event associated with the group. Also in 1955 Murakami created his reportedly stunning performance Laceration of Paper, in which he ran through a paper screen. At the second Gutai show in 1956, Shiraga used his feet to paint a large canvas sprawled across the floor. From about 1950 Shimamoto had been making paintings from layers of newspaper pasted together, painted and then pierced with holes, anticipating the pierced work of Lucio Fontana. In 1954 Murakami had made a series of paintings by throwing a ball soaked in ink at paper. In 1956 Shimamoto went on to make works called Throws of Colour by smashing glass jars filled with pigment onto canvases laid out on the floor. The art historian Yve-Alain Bois has said that ‘the activities of the Gutai group in the mid-1950s constitute one of the most important moments of post-war Japanese culture’. Ashiya City Museum of Art and History in Japan holds a large collection of Gutai work and archives. The group dissolved in 1972 following the death of Yoshihara. There was a retrospective exhibition of their work at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1999.

Googling “gutai” “group” and “art” gets 19,700 hits. Add “erotic” and the resulting number collapses to 179. So they are not going to be much help to me in either my Guide to Erotic Art in London’s National Gallery or my Anatomy of Titillation. Which comes as a surprise because rolling about half naked in mud seemed to have possibilities. To provide the Japanese with an erotic fix Shiraga would, one supposes, need to be built like a Sumo wrestler. His photographs show that this was not the case.

Googling erotic art is always an entertaining pastime and deserves an Art Note all on its own. I shall try to return to the subject in the not too distant future.