The Ends of Love-Hate-ViolenceApr 11, 2020
My discussion concerns human conflict, internal angst, and the tortures and mysteries of sex. My imagery combines multi tentacled sea creatures, big cats, charging horses, weapons of mass destruction, and weird tribal figurines with the human image.
I have early adolescent memories of the Viet Nam war era and of our nation’s defeat. I remember the violent newsreels from Cambodia, and I remember the inter-sexed, interracial hippie next door neighbors who were friendly, but who seemed isolated. I have seen sexual awakenings that crisscross gender, racial and ethnic identities. I remember the tensions between black and white people that shook Benton Harbor, the small town where I grew up.
“In this central and centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of “incarceration”, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle” (Foucault).
“Little girl lost, little boy found” to me describes those secrets of this desolate post-Apocalyptic world. There seems to be a “pin up sickened warrior” within us.
I believe that as the beginnings of our maturity mystifyingly transform us, we learn all the ropes of violence and mistrust and we are forced into isolation, despair and sexual separation. Does this cycle, though or even through its violence and trauma, recreate?
“A king has ordered soldiers to keep the night watch the corpse of a black princess, who has been bewitched. Every midnight she rises and kills the guard. At last one soldier, whose turn it is to stand guard, despairs and runs away into the woods. There he meets an “old guitarist who is our Lord Himself.” This old musician tells him where to hide in the church and instructs him how to behave so that the black princess cannot get him. With this divine help the soldier actually manages to redeem the princess and marry her” (Jung).
The earth mother of De Kooning personifies the destruction and recreation of a plentiful harvest. Bacon’s sides of beef are meant to be consumed, as human flesh. Sailboat ambiguously conveys male and female and those weird tribal figurines to become a painting of that ancient invention.
“ _From the question of the boy’s honor to that love of truth_…..Beyond the different objects that the amorous individual may become attached to, Diotima shows Socrates that love seeks to beget spiritual children, and to contemplate “absolute beauty” in its true nature, in its unalloyed purity, and in the “oneness of its form” (Foucault).
Bryan Prillwitz 2010