Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in The Sublime Now. ED Luke White and, Claire Pajaczkowska. 2009
Sublime love and Seduction,
an unCertain requiem: reading the movements of k r buxey’s Saint Teresa
Gudrun Filipska and William McDonald
1. Introduction
k r buxey’s Requiem (2002) is titled both by its musical accompaniment, Barenboim’s 1974 recording of Fauré’s Requiem,1 and also to name the piece as a celebration of the little-death in an orgasm that the video moves towards: along with the music, the video is comprised of large-scale and slowed footage of the artist’s face as she is gradually brought to climax by the attentions of an unseen lover. The piece is considered here as exhibited in the Barbican’s 2007 exhibition, Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, at which the viewer comes to the video by proceeding along the mezzanine walkway of the Barbican gallery, and passing alongside Warhol’s similar film Blow Job (1963) suspended above and parallel to the path taken and hanging elevated above its spectators.
Warhol’s film, along with Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1647-52), is cited as trigger for Requiem. The curatorial positioning makes this dialogue explicit and additionally stages Requiem as a counterpoint to Blow Job. With Bernini’s Teresa also for its intertext, and by extension Lacan’s speculations on its feminine jouissance, the video is set to essay a reclamation of the orgasm from both Warhol’s boys and Lacan’s Bernini: whereas in the psychoanalyst’s notes on the sculpture, the mystic is seen to be “in the act of enjoying,” but testifies “to not know anything about” her jouissance,2 it seems buxey’s agenda is to transcend the objects and desires that may accompany the sight of orgasm and to establish her video as a realm for her own private climax. It is paradoxically one on display but screened to be seen as something only she knows. The intention is then for an ideal female orgasm and a representation—like Bernini’s—of ecstatic, feminine affect. However as the titling of the exhibition implies, Requiem is set also to “seduce” and so to flirt with the pornographic, a liaison chanced elsewhere in buxey’s work.3 On offer is a female body, which, before it can be snatched back by the author, is to be examined and consumed.
The video is therefore full of oppositions, the ambition for this ideal and ecstatic affect against a stimulated body and object available for corruption. And as theoretical measures for any interpretation, we can find such oppositions running through Christian Mysticism: Aelred’s caritas, the ascent to God, and cupiditas, a pull back down to earth and its base sexual desires, or of course the desired divine and scorned earthly in Teresa’s ambitions for the soul’s ascent. We also have a catalogue of chaste saints and their stories of bodily desires disavowed and the most obscene of corporeal mutilations transcended in the name of faith.4 Or similarly, in the theories of a Religious Sublime we have the perfect poles of sublimis and humilis and as far as the love in an orgasm is concerned, we find in Kristeva’s Tales of Love further exploration into the duality between the body and a theological ideal beyond. In particular, in her essay on Bernard of Clairvaux, we have her speculations and revisions for a distinction between sublime and carnal love and the absolute and untainted precedence of the former. She writes that “Bernard seemed to distinguish a natural love, determined by the lover’s human condition, and a sublime love, indebted to God. The ideal primacy of the second is dependent upon the precedence of the Creator as well as upon the precedence of this love for us.”5
The video’s desires for reclamation may partly lie in this perfect primacy of the interests of the creator, but still we find ourselves regarding an artwork which could offer us either of these poles, sublime ecstasy at one and seduction at the other. Inevitably considering this work is to gauge the movements towards and away from these extremes.
We start then to work on Requiem’s movements: it is perhaps a little misnamed. While requiems, titled with a substantive inflected from the Latin word requiés-rest, are celebrated for the repose of souls of the dead, here we have a rite celebrated for souls—and bodies: social, sexual, audiovisual, vocal, lexical and on occasion communicative bodies—that are distinctly animated. There are multiple processes and vectors; but apart from the direction of Fauré’s oratorio, which in a very downward-moving and exhausted D Minor key seems with every phrase to lean towards the quiescence of a “lullaby of death,”6 very little moves without detour toward repose.
What then are, and moreover what happens within, these detours?
2. Movements and Reciprocity
The wedding feast is ready ... God the Father awaits us, he desires us not only on account of his infinite love—as his only son who is in the Father’s boom tells us: My Father loves you—but for himself, as the Prophet says, I shall do this not for you but for myself.
——St. Bernard of Clairvaux7
To catalogue the animation in buxey’s Requiem we can begin with the gesture of the artist’s face. With the rising and ebbing pleasure of the orgasm’s waves of climax the face passes from one rapturous expression to another calling to mind whatever images of ecstatic faces our memories may bring to the work; the slowed footage lingers a little on each to prolong the moment of identification—then slips away. We might move from Charcot’s Augustine to Guido Reni’s St. Cecilia, Tiepolo’s St Catherine, Mantegna’s St. Sebastian or of course Bernini’s St. Teresa.8 In watching we flick through a lexicon of extreme expressions as if taking in a video facsimile of a gallery of Messerschmidt’s Charakterköpfe.
However behind the expressions and poses that the face offers, there is a subject primarily retreating from visual exchange toward a realm of privacy. The artist’s own private climax is taken back from a visual field where a videoed orgasm might have an altogether different default position: an object for the viewer’s own private fantasy. But up to the point of this climax, detours in the performance reveal a little more than this purely private retreat. Occasionally, and sometimes seemingly involuntarily, buxey looks up or down to meet the focus of the camera and make eye contact with her audience. Consequently the body we see becomes one communicative and social as well as masturbatory and in passing into communication it takes up positions to constitute a gaze, an arrangement which is prima facie mobile: it may begin with subject and object, which is to say a viewer and viewed, but these are as quick to become reciprocal, only then to switch and reverse their declension to have the thing viewed a knowing, active subject. Lacan’s “You never look at me from the place at which I see you”9 is the obvious annotation with which to observe that here we have the movement of a face drifting in and out of eye contact, accidentally offering and then snatching back an exchange.
Questions of the frustration or allure in this looking might be just as well introduced alongside theories of another desire: that of Bernard of Clairvaux, taking us back to Christian Mysticism. In the search for the divine figure theorised in his sermons on the Song of Songs Bernard infers a similarly mobile reciprocity. Kristeva notes that desire in his text is excited just as much by imagined lack in the thing desired as it is by the want of the desiring subject, so that the mystic as man, in loving God as divine, must recognise that God’s desire precedes his own. God’s lack and desire come first and it is imagined to be what we might summarise as His Genesic motive. If God creates man—a congregation, audience—in His image it is at least in part to fill a lack in that image. Kristeva proposes that an understanding of this sequence becomes for the cistercian key to his good desire: “The desire for God finally proves to be fulfilling if and only if the lover (the believer) recognises that God desired us first to the extent of creating us in his image.”10
Transferring the positions of this desire and image to those of the video—a God that creates his congregation and artist producing her audience— Bernard can assist in affirming that the original lack and consequent desire of the creator must be understood as preceding the visual object, a point fundamental to Requiem’s agenda. The desires of the artist must precede those of her viewer in order to separate this image of a woman’s coming orgasm from the transactions of what might easily be taken as that default commodity, a spectacle gratifying the predetermined delectation of the beholder.11
Who comes first is then significant. But with one more aperçu from Kristeva, the exchange becomes more complicated than one of a simple sequence or separation as love theory might here suggest. Our desire is satisfied by the Other while at the same time that Other is sated by creating us in its image. The fulfilment of the desire of the believer (audience) and the desires of God (the creator of the audience in Her image) become codependent, simultaneous and ordered to Kristeva not simply by sequence, but a “mirrorlike motion.”12 This analogy pushes us to consider Requiem as an image across which viewed and viewer move, oscillating as switching lovers, subjects and objects.
3. Movements in accompaniment
If this amounts to a practice of looking between straying and choosing, attention to the work is complicated still further by the involuntary audition of its musical accompaniment—in listening we have still more movement.
Though timed and edited to have her body’s climax coincide with the close of Fauré’s “In Paradisum” buxey’s paroxysms are certainly not set to the music. Her rising pleasure comes at moments with the music’s crescendo or moves to the right rhythm but just as often arrives in silence to have image and sound drift repeatedly in and out of sync. The music ostensibly comes from no simple location, so as an example Fischer-Dieskau’s “Libera Me” is imagined neither heard by the performer to guide her motion nor unheard and entirely incidental. The undecided diegetic mode in this desyncing visual layer makes the relation between the action we hear and that which we see a very uncertain one. What then might a voicing of “Libera me” ordinarily be doing?
As well as being appended to some Requiems, these words are sung in offices for the dead as responsary, but with a significant conjugation. It is sung, in a flourish of dramatic substitution, in the first person as the celebrated deceased (the choir asks for deliverance on behalf of the dead to transubstantiate object for its ideal, becoming and reanimating a corpse). If it holds any meaning then, the baritone’s first person text might be heard sung as the body of Requiem’s little death. We should find prosopopeia to stage a little death voicing itself, and at least in the liturgical logic of the video, we need not worry about buxey moving to Fischer-Dieskau (or the impossibility of him regarding buxey as he sings), but consider instead Fischer-Dieskau’s function being to sing as buxey.
Yet of course he cannot; she disavows him as soon as he disavows her, as they drift in and out of time. Any feminist agenda for an orgasm’s autonomy and agency in the piece cannot reside simply in the visuals’ co- option of the voice we hear and its articulation. It could never have been the case, after all the “Libera me” articulates an outward plea for deliverance entirely out of joint with buxey’s reclamation. What kind of presence then does the voice have with its functional and semantic uncertainty? Although the semantic presence is unclear, one corporeal in the singing can be tested with (or against) Barthes’s well known essay on voices and their corporeal materiality “The Grain of the Voice.”13 This is an essay to which Requiem is already tied by the presence of Fischer-Dieskau.
Barthes presents Fischer-Dieskau, in a contrast to another baritone opera and mélodie singer Charles Panzéra, as having a voice with very little body, one that is all lungs—which for him are only ever the singing body’s “stupid organs.” They swell and exhale in a way that is clipped and precise, producing a sound for Barthes which works above all in the service of articulation. The writer goes on to claim that this voice primarily respects “semantic and lyric structure” so to erase any of the surface texture of a voice’s bodily organs: “the tongue, the glottis, the teeth, the mucous membranes, the nose.”14 Fischer-Dieskau sings without body and therefore for Barthes has a voice in which “nothing seduces.” It is the very opposite of Panzéra’s and his revelation of the vocal body in all the graininess its surface textures.
So much for any claim then for Fischer-Dieskau’s presence as an introduction of body. Listening with Barthes, the baritone we hear in Requiem is all about present meaning and absent body. However, the voice unable to sing for its face cannot offer it meaning and the video presents a problem for the simple opposition between Fischer-Dieskau and Panzéra.
The form and content of a voice stripped of clear diegetic function moves then between the poles of Barthes essay: very verbal articulation, the precise formation of an utterance on one hand, and on the other the corporal seductions of whatever is left when an utterance is made void of that function. So watching the decelerated visual footage primes a very particular kind of hearing: one attentive to a movement syncopated between the glottic or oral texture and the rhythms of a voice’s sense.
4. More movements of a Mystic
From the movement between the opposites articulacy and body we are lead back again to Requiem’s reference to St. Teresa; with this buxey places herself alongside the writings of saints and Christian mystics and finds herself entangled in their dualist struggle with corrupt bodies and redemptive transports of the spirit. As well as with the orgasmic connotations for Bernini’s sculpture, that buxey may intend to reclaim,15 we should gauge her agenda against a clear Teresan direction for her video’s detours. Turning to St. Teresa’s writings, we find in her programme for prayer a great deal of bodily toil, endurance and concentration to the point of exhaustion before the lofty goal of rapture can be attained.16 She describes this final condition thus:
The lord catches up the soul just as one might say the clouds gather up the mists of the earth and carries it right out of itself ... you see and feel this cloud or this powerful eagle rising and bearing you up on its wings.
If there are movements in a Requiem for Teresa then, they should be effecting ascent.
As the celebration of St. Christina’s Requiem attests, to have a celebration of final rest thwarted by flight is not unprecedented.18 Though the action breaks with the service’s liturgical purpose it does affirm the integrity of that saintly dualism—Christina’s flight was to escape the stink of her congregation and its bodies. We find plenty more of this dualism in Teresa’s autobiography: accounts of her aspiration to overcome the body, its functions and malfunctions, which after all present an undesirable distraction from ideal spiritual matters. They remained for Teresa not easily overcome:
When I saw how bound I was to my body and how my spirit on the other hand demanded time for itself, I became so depressed that I burst into floods of tears.20
Despite her intricately explained strategies for vacating a decrepit body and the demands of its materiality, there is little consideration in the autobiography for the vessel left behind, the remnants left by the soul for her congregation. Similarly buxey’s body, its gestures and physical movement remain as relics vulnerable to the concupiscent desires and decisions of the audience outside her private raptures. The work may well pull attention down to these remnants just as much as up to the idealised climax. It should be asked then: what is the prevailing vector for the movements in these detours: upwards or down, an elevation or a fall?
5. k r buxey and her company
Requiem has more than just Teresa determining this axis; returning to Seduced, some close analysis of the video’s position in the exhibition can open up for us the roles of its other determinants. As we know, its screening room is entered from Blow Job’s walkway, where DeVeren Bookwalter, the film’s performer, oversees all those coming and going. Alongside the walkway, this room can be seen as a transitional space because, although within its partitions we are immersed in the sound track and large scale projection of Requiem, the space is not set up for full length viewing. It allows the visitor a rather self-determining mode of looking, one that picks and chooses between buxey and Bookwalter to extend further the repertoire of ecstatic faces introduced above.
Nevertheless, from this repertoire, some images linger for longer than others. Like Requiem, Blow Job has a decelerated projection that allows this series of stills to crystallise out of a motion picture.21 In this way the two operate similarly, but as well as offering tableaux for our viewing they have moments of their performers’ looking to punctuate any visual straying— uncomfortable instances of reciprocity, voyeurism, shifting humiliation and inevitably inculpation to pull us smartly out of this free-play:
The set-up of the film establishes a semi-conscious reflexiveness, with the viewer foisted into a position of voyeurism ... the film is a process, a mechanism, a technological and ideological process that includes you and that cannot exclude you.
The interesting point in this viewer-inclusion is the guidance it initiates, guidance in the direction of (Gidal’s) “ideological process.” Bookwalter looks at and then through us while buxey looks up, chin pointing to ecstasy, or down to the body of her pleasure. Along with reciprocity back and forth there follow for us suasions up and down and the curatorial decision to allow freedom in browsing is tempered intricately by moments of attention commanded by the look of the performers.
Significant relations of control and power arise then out of these complications in reciprocity and they extend back also to the third text in Requiem’s array, St. Teresa in Ecstasy and its space. The supervisory position of Blow Job, Bookwalter’s position of the experienced, knowing overseer on his balcony makes this link architecturally clear: with the planar arrangement of his screen perpendicular to that of buxey and with his empowering elevation over us as we come to look, we find ourselves occupying an area in the gallery organised to the spatial logic of the Cornaro Chapel, the aedicule in the Santa Maria della Vittoria housing Bernini’s Teresa. It also has two balconies on either side wall occupied by its patron and other significant members of the Cornaro family. They look down upon the saint and look also out to keep an eye on the congregation. As a sister- space for Seduced, the chapel shows that the viewing of an ecstatic climax is one subject to tight institutional control.
The path allotted us through the Santa Maria to the chapel is similarly disciplined, which means of course there are limits all around that might be transgressed for new unorthodox perspectives on Teresa and her assumed upward axis. But first we shall follow the course given us by the church. Proceeding down the nave the visitor is flanked by shallow chapel niches, three on each side, leading to a dome at the building’s crossing. The church has shallow transepts, which are entirely taken up by a fourth chapel for each side so that the rood screens cordoning their altars meet the edge of the nave. While still at the doors of the church, the Cornaro Chapel is not yet visible, though the line of the balustrade of its screen and the end of the right side’s balcony are in sight. If coming specifically to visit the chapel, we have in this space a marked sense of suspense: a baroque tension to set off movement toward the architecture’s resolution. Proceeding along the nave the pillars of the ceiling’s barrel vault, and the chapel niches they frame, form into a series of thresholds—side exits to be passed over in favour of the main thoroughfare of that suspense. It is, as Irving Lavin argues, an architecture of transition; but one whose impression of divergent exits is made out of quite purposeful artifice.
While moving along the nave, the eye falls rhythmically into the chapel niches: the square, immured columns of their entrance arches offering and then curtailing a sense of depth as perspectives alter along the visitor’s continued path. The movement in this recession and flattening of space is made still more uncertain by the rich veining in the church’s marble surfaces, confusing and occulting any shadow which might clarify our sense of depth. The walls of the nave in opening up to these side chapels and their illusory effect give the impression of the building’s drawing in breath: with diaphragmatic effect, the chapel walls pull out opening up the space and then in turn push us back into the nave, pressured to continue along the central path. What happens in the larynx of this conduit is quite simple: at the edge of this horizontal base for the body of the church, we find ourselves squarely beneath a dome in the building’s brightest point, looking for Teresa.
As if by magic ... with one bound at this central point and to experience there the unique quiet, the secluded, serene independence that seems to be realized.
There are accounts of the Baroque space which might suggest this arrival almost as an epiphany. Frankl for example has the visitor quite suddenly thrown in “one bound” to the church’s centre and there are images from Deleuze that suggest an “expulsion into luminosity” by such a church’s body. However, our position has been carefully administered and it continues to be with yet another cycle of reciprocity to guide our attention. From the right side balcony the chapel’s patron, Cardinal Cornaro, looks down to make our eye contact and fix us in a designated viewing position. As with buxey and Bookwalter, eye contact precludes any aimless wandering, or picking and choosing of image and composition.
From this point, at a distance of around twenty-five feet, the chapel can only be viewed in its totality.30 Teresa is set high up in her chapel recess, the posture of the angel and the rays of sun behind pull the gaze sharply upwards. To enjoy the spectacle from the position allowed us by Cornaro, is as Michael J. Call argues in his essay on the Counter-Reformation politics of the chapel, to submit to his authority; it is also to accept his superior capacity to see, and understand the work. But here we depart from that path allotted us and, rejecting the spiritual lesson of Cornaro, we step over the threshold established by his gaze and proceed closer to the statue itself. Here points of Teresa’s corporeality become newly apparent and they have as their starting point an article held directly before us: only just above eye level—the left foot of the saint points down towards us.
6. where we find ourselves looking
Teresa’s left foot stretches out of the mass of her folding habit with a downward-pointing big toe, causing her other toes to splay out upwards, and arching the sole. Looking from the floor of the chapel we see little of what the sculpture’s photographic documentation promises (most of which seems to enjoy more of the Cornaros’ perspective from the balconies than the congregation’s from floor level), and the foot’s straining pose becomes the clearest image of the paroxysms that run out from the deep shiver of pain (or pleasure) through the saint’s body as the angel pulls his spear out through her entrails. This shiver of course remains veiled beneath the mass of cloth—Deleuze’s “bourage schizophrenique” which Georges Didi- Hubermann sees surrounding another Bernini, the Beata Ludovica, fits well here as the Saint’s habit is certainly a split form. On one hand it gives the body its clothes but also exceeds the shape of its contours to offer instead highly sublimated ornamentation for the writhing flesh imagined underneath. The foot is then unique, emerging in spite of this bourage as a rare naked body part available for quite immediate and unobstructed examination.
The significance of a denuded foot might not be just corporeal. We could take its inclusion to be insignia for Teresa and her Order: the Discalced, or barefoot, Carmelites. Or, looking at the wider context of visual culture of its era we could detect some convention in depicting saints and pilgrims without shoes. Like those explicitly lunging out from the foreground to Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto (1604-5) bare feet seem to have offered the grounds for signs of labour, pain and perseverance, to be seen as dirty, worn and calloused—in sum bare feet can be pious feet.
However it is also to be noted that in the engravings Lavin cites as Bernini’s key sources, Wierix’s Mystic Transverberation of St. Teresa and The Levitation of Saint Teresa by Colleart and Galle, Teresa is seen with her feet shod or covered. So what we see emerging from the textures and folds of carved cloth shows a marked departure from these sources and the conventions we might expect for the pious foot. In many ways, it seems, the exposed foot in Bernini’s sculpture is completing a transgression for the saint begun by Proccacini’s Teresa who, leaning back, allows her toes to poke out from her habit, rather naughtily pointing downwards and marking with their clean whiteness a stark contrast to the fabric.
With Bernini this contrast is of course rendered in the single surface of marble, but in the bijou foot against the massive texture of cloth and the rough-hewn cloud on which she reclines, it is no less bare.
Her feet were small too, and after her death were seen to be transparent as mother-of-pearl; a gentleman had once caught sight of them and complimented Teresa, who without a blush replied: “Have a good look, caballero, for this is the last time you will see them”.
The foot we have is as attractive as Teresa’s was reported to have been in life and as smooth, clean and unmarked as it was, pearl-like, for her reliquary in death. And in this perfection it is a long way from the soles we have seen, filthy and hardened through God’s work. With this aseptic foot in flight as synecdoche for an idealised body swept upwards on its cloud, there is a distinct problem for Teresa. In her writings it is clear that vision and levitation are separate occurrences: during a levitation Teresa had command of her senses and saw it as “one of the greatest shames and inconveniences she had to suffer.” We find accounts where Teresa would throw herself to the ground and even clutch at iron railings to prevent herself from rising up into the air. The levitating body is above all a body and one that in making a spectacle of itself diverts worship away from the true objective of her labours—concentration in prayer towards a transport not of the body but the soul.
By positioning Teresa within a scene of spectacular elevation and side- stepping any shame a levitation might have caused the saint, it has been suggested that Bernini deliberately chose to ignore significant details in the accounts of her religious experience. Instead of a woman straining to cling to the ground in embarrassment at her body’s rising, the viewer is presented with an image of youth and submission, one quite contemptuous of the Saint’s accounts and convictions. In fact, one is reminded more of the young Teresa’s rebuke of the Caballero and his lascivious attentions than a pious saint exhausted by her four stages of prayer. The foot then offers some interesting paradoxes—a strained part of a body submitting to this levitation that should be resisted and a sign pointing to the beauty of the saint forbidden us by her dedication to the church. Then also we are offered a body part reaching down to ground a flight which Teresa never sanctioned. It might be a caveat carved into the piece by Bernini to acknowledge his own misinterpretations or one more delinquent sign of the saint’s corporeality.
For Bataille the paradoxes in a foot idealised and one pulling us back down to earth converge. In his treatise on “The Big Toe” the foot never departs the ground for long and constantly serves to pull the upward ambitions of man back down into the mud.
Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse—a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.
Confusion in back and forth motion is the modus operandi for foot-desire and we find an interesting account of its prohibition and transgression in the histories of Spanish Court etiquette to which Bataille refers.39 He conveys the story of Count Villamediana who conspires to touch the foot of Queen Elizabeth. Bataille interprets the Count’s pleasure in touching the regal body coming not simply from its beauty and perfection but on the contrary “deriv(ing) from the ugliness and imperfection represented by the baseness of the foot” as its general condition. The prohibitions around the foot inspire in the Count two-fold and quite contradictory desires—to touch something that may be in one’s idealising mind perfect, or that is in all practical likelihood altogether base. The dynamics of these prohibitions of etiquette and piety do not aid in a decision about visual desire for a foot; they leave us with, as Bataille puts it, “two orders of seduction,” ones ideal and ones base. So the image of this organ, as Bataille calls it, sets off a move between quite contradictory qualities for the body, which is altogether disorganising for coherent corporeality; the shock of the foot’s appearance triggers a “very shrill expression to the disorder of the human body.”
So as long as we look at the foot, we have a presentation of multiple connotations. And with these our attention climbs along voluptuous lines sweeping up from Teresa’s splaying toes across the tarsals and then, into the folds and upwards to a paroxysm sublimated to very religious ecstasy. Or just as easily it slips beneath her habit to follow the line of flesh and fall to the profane grounds of an organ altogether carnal. The foot can be seen at once as trailing edge of a soul ascending and the end of a corrupting body pulled back down into the contaminating mud. The affects of the viewer converge again with those of a lover, not this time with Cistercian desire but with the amorous panic, which we find in Barthes’s Lover’s Discourse, of a subject filled up by a storm of images. In the ascent and gravity of this naked body-part, frames flicker through an image repertoire of filthy, pious, damaged, idealised, sexualised body parts and ones inviting illicit compliment as much as signifying elevation.
Flickering is also a viewing mode in Requiem, both in the slightly protracted projection speed and the bank of images it calls to mind. And along with it there are also dynamics of ascent and gravity akin to those of the ethereal-corporeal foot. They begin with the head and its suasions we have seen tipping slowly up and backwards with each surge of climax and the arousal of each new entry for the image bank. With this tilt the face we see joins a legion of the subjects of art history who dare to show themselves in the process of leaning towards a fall: As Didi-Huberman put it those qui “osent nous montrer leur glissement progressif, leur propre tombée souveraine,” those performing a clinamen always restarting. The chin of Venus in Cosimo’s Venus, Mars and Cupid (1490), encouraged by Cupid himself already leaning several degrees too far, tips up and her head rolls back. She appears on the point of leaning backwards, as if perpetually recommencing a recline. However, in Requiem the moving image has to do more than occupy the moment of a tipping point. To keep it moving, and her ascents restarting, with each wave of climax the chin tilts down just as much as up and the head rotates forward as much as back. And between them the performer’s eyes can pass through that reciprocal contact with their viewer, so to trigger a flush of embarrassment at the sight of a body falling from ecstasy or falling out of time with the music to become aware of itself performing in silence.
At these moments it is the body whole that one becomes aware of: in Bernini’s St. Teresa in Ecstasy the synecdochal foot rushes up to the the source of Teresa’s pain folding her body into what Lavin calls a “paroxysm of the solar plexus.” Then, with buxey’s tilting chin, Requiem’s body folds out and into itself, her head rotating backwards to perform an ascent to the video’s private, ideal climax and forward to concentrate on the work of stimulation and a will to orgasm. Through the video’s flickering intertext we might see Requiem playing out the Cornaro chapel’s tensions between idealisation and corruption by drawing the viewer from representations of pleasures diffuse and unknowable towards those of a localised and understood masturbation.
7. Towards a conclusion
So around the text, this foot and video, a wide array of images, hagiographies, and sounds collects—Bataille’s “shrill expression of disorder” can be the defining quality of their complications, just as it is for an indecent body-part made visible. It is a quality that can put alongside elevation and transport of the soul the downward pulls of illness, humiliation and concupiscence.
The ecclesiastical and sexual-gender ideals of both Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa and buxey’s Requiem rely on particulalrly prescribed and knowing practices of looking but in Bernini’s we find an object enabling a quite delinquent mode to bypass its tightly administered religious sublime. The question to complete this intertextual circuit around Requiem is: if for Teresa we find an ideal spiritual troubled by the corporeal, what is the visual object that does for buxey what Bernini’s foot does for Teresa?
Across a narrative focussed on an ideal orgasm, buxey’s video has written into it various levels of detail to draw us from the idealised to the surface. With a further swoop from articulation to body we return to what is heard at the point of Fischer-Dieskau, failing to sing for her climax:
Libera me, Domine,
de morte aeterna,
in die illa tremenda
quando coeli movendi sunt et terra, dum veneris judicare
saeculum per ignem
With the close listening effected by slowed looking, an r in morte now vibrates quite long enough for it to be heard decaying and quietly ringing through the full length of the aeterna-eternal that follows; it might be not so much semantic or expressive as a synthesising sound resounding across words, skating over their consonants to become an extended and artificial roll. It is one approaching the “totally abstract” and that “beyond the norms of the singer.” These are things Barthes proposed as belonging to Panzéra and his voice’s body, certainly not to Fischer-Dieskau and his articulation. And yet with this video, they are what we can come to hear.
Similarly, vowel soundings widen. Fischer-Dieskau’s die in the following line might stretch, with the timings and incongruity of what we see, to end up pronounced in extension. It becomes the sort of grainy grounds on which Barthes hears Panzéra separating his ès from his és with the almost disinterested attention to detail that the writer admires—and desires. Significantly then, with our attention guided by the complication of these visuals timed to be free of sense, the voice of Fischer-Dieskau can fall in Barthes’s opposition on the side of the corporeal; its aural grain never seemed more oral, and deprived of a capacity for straightforward articulation, it never seemed more identifiably: the body of Fischer-Dieskau.
While the voice we hear becomes one freed of its capacity to articulate, the face we see also has its communicative function dissipate. When it is understood, it looks up or down to resemble a familiar pose or make a known gesture; or it looks, perhaps accidentally, at us to become reciprocal. But these moments of understanding are rarely the case and fades as the look is snatched back. The face’s image always moves on to begin again. Our looking, like Fischer-Dieskau’s singing, continues with newly disinterested attention to detail, and what it sees is a face, slowed and greatly enlarged. Though there are parameters around it to organise its expression or gesture and more widely its narrative, between them all the blemishes, glistening perspiration and the repeating patina of pores in this face’s skin are there to be noticed—traces to log the material presence and history beyond those parameters as Panzéra’s consonants might be patinated by the wear and work of a language living “for ages past.”48 With a surplus of time, the eye slips between the agenda and expressions of the work to dwell on these details; they are not anomalous—skin and orgasm go together—but neither are they fulfilling in chorus a clarity of meaning.
In the Cornaro chapel, these tensions between form and content have their architectural as well as vocal counterpart: the veins of its marble skin seep out across its frames, pillars, thresholds and floors to extend over the edges of the building’s structural and sculptural sense (and their agendas). They do not follow the parameters of a work’s beginnings and ends but, as Deleuze imagined, form “creases” in the matter we occupy.49 Tracing them we are pulled up and down pillars, across tiling, into recesses and through all the thresholds and undulations which surround the viewer as the building’s pulsating membrane. If we are immersed in this space, sound and face we find little sense of end and edge and are offered instead qualities we might recognise as painterly, massive and—above all—qualities to excite movement across a corporeal texture.
*
This increasingly unequivocal concentration on body presents a problem for Requiem’s agenda—just as it does in the hagiographies emerging as its intertext. Teresa’s ambitions are for an ideal “up-and-away” from the body and they hold ultimately a contempt for the corporeal, a suspicion of it as corrupting impediment. As we can read in accounts of her physical elevations the same is felt even for the body that works for her soul’s ascent. Unlike Saint Christina’s quite purposeful elevation, for Teresa the body’s rising is a moment of regrettable shame. The attention levitations brought to her physicality made them spectacles of the body rather than any rite of renunciation or embrace of the ideal divine; and they leave her, ecstatic or otherwise, dragged, by the feet, back down into a humiliating corporeal vessel.
As might be the danger in any spectacular body, Teresa’s elevating form ends up as phantasmagoria obfuscating the means of its production, at least the inspiration or ambition in its production. As noted already, one thing her autobiography, as textual organisation of an experience beyond text, fails to do is administer what happens to the body left behind. As allegory for this omission we have histories of the particularly brutal devouring of Teresa’s body by the curators of her reliquary.51 Like the body whole, a reliquary follows also the economic logic of the phantasmagoria, the congregation seduced by an ideal makes a fetish of its parts—harvested for display and hoarded ready to be reinvested with whatever voracious desire, meaning or to be privileged in whatever ways that the fetishist’s libidinal drives may phantasmatically determine.
Potential overdetermination is just as much a danger in the Santa Maria della Vittoria where Teresa’s humiliation in body is similarly ignored; between them Bernini and Cardinal Cornaro transform the elevating form that shames the saint into the grounds for an authorised counter-reformation image of sublime love. Might the emerging body of buxey be similarly left for misuse, her agenda in representing the unrepresentable as her own private climax left to be perverted into an image of a body available for consumption and layers of desire entirely external to it?
*
The dualism coming out of the various participants in this conversation around buxey require some summation. We have a corporeal surface in buxey’s skin that works alongside and in the same way as that of the voice of Fischer-Dieskau, the straining and pulsating architecture of Santa Maria della Vittoria and its sister space the transitory galleries of Seduced. These are surfaces all similarly disinterested, not allowed clear articulation. However they are not altogether divested of intention in their movement, and the point to come to is that it is their hesitant, slowed and straining detours, which keep the audiovisual body of the video animated, and which move the text on from the position of such a commodity form. So to conclude then we need some sense of the position this body ends up occupying.
The reading begins with a choice of elevation or fall for the movements deciding this final position, a flight of the soul toward the ideal in a rite of sublime love or a descent to the concupiscence of carnal love; a choice then in this dualism. However, the body and soul of the video hold unsteady ground between the two poles of ideal and imperfect body. It is a position to confound the laws of primacy underpinning an understanding of sublime love and the oppositions on which it relies. And with this we are taken back to Kristeva’s Bernard and the decision between sublime and carnal love.
Unlike that of Teresa, the body of Bernard is not such a categorical problem. As Kristeva proposes, though Bernard considers himself exiled in the sentient corporeal from, there is in his thinking (and feeling) a collapse in the opposition between the imagined original “divine resemblance” of man and the bestial form in which he has come to wallow. This is clearest in Kristeva’s commentary on the saint’s reflections on loving God and we return to her speculations about Sublime Love, “The ideal primacy of [sublime love] ... is dependant upon the precedence of the Creator as well as upon the precedence of his love for us.” She continues to note however that Bernard begins reflection, “as a precocious renaissance man,” with the materiality of human experience as his gauge. So he inevitably acknowledges that a loving subject has at its disposal a conception of carnal love first. It presents again an interesting confusion of sequence: as Kristeva observes, although the carnal comes de facto first it should de jure be the sublime. Just as much as Teresa’s, Bernard’s body is a medical and physical entity and it is always there within and around knowledge and reflection,52 seen by Kristeva performing a neat alignment with a modern-day epistemological conceit: “This carnal affect liable to disgrace if not well ordered seems astonishingly contemporary because of the immanence of the signifier.”53 A body must contain aspirations for the ideal and any estimation of the ideal once conjured up is always understood in bodily terms. To complement this we have the desire of another saint, St. Hadewijch of Brabant and her remorseful admittance to God “what is bitter to me above all / Is that I cannot touch you.”
Her sublime desires can only take a haptic form in the receptive texture of a finger tip.
With this codependency of body and sublime desire in Bernard, Kristeva comes to note not a dualism, or necessary clear choice, but more of a difference, the idea of a movement between the material’s similarity and dissimilarity to the ideal.
There are two places for the reasonable soul, the inferior one, which it rules, and the superior one, where it rests, and it is God ... Our body finds itself located between the spirit it must serve, and the desires of the flesh or the powers of darkness, which wage war on the soul, as a cow might be between the peasant and the thief.
The commentary Kristeva offers to this describes well for us the recurring arrival of the surface of body texture across any face aspiring toward the ideal. “The more the mystic goes beyond such a bovine body, the more he assigns to it its place of animal remnant, the more the “cow” imposes itself upon the affect and love, even though they are administered, dictated, implemented by the grace of the Other.” As is the case in the reciprocity between creator and audience, loved and lover, which Bernard brings above, in buxey’s movement toward ecstasy her ideal and her body reverberate as Kristeva describes, with “mirror-like motion.” buxey’s Teresa is just as much then buxey’s Bernard.
We might then finally read the work as distinctly in-sublime, one always backing off from the limit across which it would become un-representable (and where it would leave its relics for pornography). Instead, the video functions as no more unequivocally sublime and upward-moving than it does downward-falling and directed to a seducing body (which its place in the eponymous exhibition may infer). As observed above, in its gestural motion the video’s work towards a sublime love is continually restarting, as reverse homologue to Didi-Huberman’s “clinamen toujours recommencée.” But this is the case only insofar as it restarts these upwards surges alongside revenant falls, making it concurrently both reverse and the true analogue of the chute of the climamen. It is a requiem for la petite mort that finds its function, and avoids its commodification, in a liturgy of reverberating vertical uncertainty.
Notes
1. Gabriel Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48, Sheila Armstrong, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Orchestre de Paris, Daniel Barenboim (England, EMI Records Ltd, 1987) CDM 7 69038 2.
2. Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 71.
3. In other pieces such as fucked (2000), Mind your Head (2000) and Aria (2001), a similar negotiation of pornographic imagery, through the media of photography and video can be seen in buxey’s work.
4. For a collection and translation of virgin martyr legends especially sensitive to the violence and erotics of these hagiographies see Karen A. Winstead, ed., Chaste Passions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
5. Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 162. 6. The characterisation of Fauré’s Requiem as a “lullaby of death” is recalled in a letter by Louis Aguettant cited in Carlo Caballero, Fauré and French Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 189.
7. From the second sermon on In Vigilia Nativitatis Domini, cited in Jacques Blanpain, “Language mystique, expression du desir,” Collectanea Cisterciensia 36, no. 1 (1974): 53.
8. These are just a few possible images the facial expressions may invoke. For Charcot’s Augustine in ecstasy see for example “Attidudes Passionelles: Menacé” from Bourneville and Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (Paris, Bureaux du Progrès médical, 1879-1880). Guido Reni’s St. Cecilia (1606) is in the Norton Simon Museum of Art; Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s St. Catherine of Siena (circa 1746), and Mantegna’s St. Sebastian (1456-59) are in the Kunsthistoriches
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Museum Vienna; and Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa is in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria Della Vittoria, Rome.
9. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 103.
10. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 160.
11. One useful examination of the image as site of sex’s commerce is Rona Goffen, “Introduction,” Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 9-16 . Goffen resolves, via Susan Gubar’s theory on pornographic narrative representing an image-maker’s fears about himself, that the subject of his Venus of Urbino (1538) is essentially Titian himself and his anxieties about the long- repressed desires barred to him. If an image is made to reincarnate this lost affect, and transform the “greatest trauma” into the “greatest thrill” for the viewer, then buxey’s video circumvents this exchange, handing back the commodity of this prosopopeia before it can begin: to make her subject her immediate and present self. See also Susan Gubar, “Representing Pornography: Feminism, Criticism and Depictions of Female Violation,” Critical Enquiry 13 (1987): 712-758.
12. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 160, our emphasis.
13. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press 1977).
14. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 183.
15. As well as Lacan’s thoughts noted above, perhaps the best known propositions of this sculpture as representation of female orgasm are in President Charles de Brosses’ quip “Si c’est ici l’amour divin, je le connais.” Cited in numerous sources, see for example Ann Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth Century Art and Architecture (London: Lawrence King Publishing, 2005), 111.
16. An image of the toil Teresa deems necessary in the first stages of prayer towards this goal can be seen in the gardening metaphor she uses. For her four stages of prayer see Saint Teresa, The Life Of Saint Teresa Of Avila By Herself (London: Penguin, 1957), chapters 11 to 19.
17. Saint Teresa, The Life Of Saint Teresa Of Avila By Herself, 136.
18. For an account of Christina’s flight from her requiem’s congregation see Vita Sackville-West, The Eagle And The Dove (London: Michael Joseph,1943), 23- 24: “St. Christina ... so much disliked the smell of human bodies that she thought nothing of climbing trees, flinging herself into mill-races, or crawling into ovens to escape the offending odour, and during her own requiem mass flew from her coffin up to the roof, away from the congregation and perched there on the rafters until the priest made her come down again.”
19. Teresa suffered throughout her life from “fearful effects of emaciation, insensibility, paralysis, cardiac agony, fever and pains in the head which drove her to distraction.” see Vita Sackville-West, The Eagle and The Dove, 37.
20. Saint Teresa, The Life Of Saint Teresa Of Avila By Herself, 312.
21. Blow Job is projected at silent speed (18 frames per second), see Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol: Blow Job (London: Afterall, 2008), 1.
22. Gidal, Andy Warhol: Blow Job , 5.
Sublime Love and Seduction, an Uncertain Requiem 165
23. The urge forward here is, of course, a perfect inflection of the fourth of Wölfflin’s categories for the change in style from the Renaissance to Baroque. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque (London: Collins, 1964), 58.
24. Comparing the space to Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’s entrance vestibule to the Farnese Palace, Lavin explains that “the architecture of the niches ... belongs to a specific tradition, and had a definite connotation: it was architecture for entranceways and corridors, architecture through which one passes to get somewhere else; it was, in short, transition architecture.” Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 97.
25. For the role of the immured column in Baroque Massiveness, see Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 52.
26. For this image of architecture becoming corporeal, as well as suggesting the image of the lungs of Fischer-Dieskau shaping sounds in the nave of his voice as an analogy, we take also a lead from Deleuze’s image of the Baroque imagination having an especially “muscular conception of matter:” It folds and enfolds the subject in its caverns according to quite pulmonary rhythms of “tension-release and contraction-dilation.” Giles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: Continuum, 2006), 7.
27. A useful image for this can be borrowed from the path down the nave and around a choir’s ambulatory in the Gothic cathedral, see Paul Frankl, Principles of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420-1900 (London: MIT Press, 1968), 28. The whirl that in the Gothic cathedral is pushed up towards infinity by the motion of the nave, here begins at its very start as we move along distracted left and right by the chapel recesses; it continually changes its form, a coil that is sucked out to the sides , but then squashed back along the nave into a spiral of longitudinal ellipses pulling us on in anticipation of the focal point.
28. Frankl, Principles of Architectural History, 28.
29. Frankl, Principles of Architectural History, 28 and Deleuze, The Fold, 7.
30. On the importance of this viewing position see Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Arts, 98.
31. Michael J. Call, “Boxing Teresa: The Counter Reformation and Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel,” Woman’s Art Journal 18, no. 1 (1997): 37.
32. Like Bookwalter, Cornaro has a privileged position; being able to look down on an ecstatic body is something afforded by his authority in the Counter Reformation Church and it seems to say: “you can look at an image of ecstasy only if, like me, you know how to.”
33. For the idea of a “bourage” around Bernini’s Beata Ludovica Albertoni (1671) see Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa Moderna, Essai sur le drapé tombé (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2002) 39. For the original idea see Deleuze, The Fold, 141, where we find this “bourage” quite charged, it “could not be unravelled without going to infinity and thus extracting its spiritual lesson.”
34. See for example Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. Matthew (1559-1600), Pomarancio’s St. Domitilla with Sts. Nereus and Archilleus (1598-99), Ribalta’s St. Frances Embracing the Crucified Christ (circa 1620) or Cavarozzi’s St. Ursula and Her Companions with Pope Ciriacus and St. Catherine of Alexandria (1608).
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35. Sackville-West, The Eagle and the Dove, 24.
36. Sackville-West, The Eagle and the Dove, 53.
37. For a claim that Bernini is expressly ignoring Teresa’s written descriptions, see Susanne Warma, “Ecstasy and Vision: Two Concepts Connected with Bernini’s Teresa” Art Bulletin 66, no. 3 (Sept 1984): 509.
38. Georges Bataille “The Big Toe,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 20-21.
39. Bataille refers to Salomon M Reinach, “Pieds pudiques,” in Cultes, mythes et religions, vol. 1 (Paris: E. Leroux, 1905), 105-110.
40. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 23.
41. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 22.
42. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 201. 43. “...they dare to show us their progressive descent, their own supreme, stirring fall. Their state, I should say, of an always recommencing clinamen.” Didi-Huberman, Ninfa Moderna, 13.
44. Lavin, Bernini Unity of the Arts, 109.
45. For further points on spectator control and the issues at stake in the presentation of the Teresa narrative see Michael J. Call “Boxing Teresa,” 37.
46. See sleeve notes to Fauré, Requiem, Op. 48.
47. Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 184.
48. For Panzéra’s interests in the sung consonant exceeding their phonetic functions see Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 184.
49. Deleuze writes on veins in marble as “creases of matter ... swarming holes that endlessly feed our disquiet, our boredom, or our giddiness.” See The Fold, 34.
50. For these surfaces which excite an essentially Baroque sensibility, we have as subtext, Wölfflin’s category of “Massivness” in Baroque architecture, “a tendency to amorphousness” where “everything bursts its bounds” Wölfflin, Renaisance and Baroque, 45. Similarly with Deleuze, the Baroque is typified by “a texturology that attests to a generalised organicism, or to a ubiquitous presence of organisms” which he suggests may be found in Caravaggio’s paintings. Deleuze, The Fold, 131. Mieke Bal develops further this Baroque “texturology,” one at once Liebnizian and Caravaggesque in the photographs of Andre Serrano. The close ups of the bodies in his “morgue series” form a “hallucinatory perception,” the eye travels up and down the enlarged hairs and goose bumps on skin “in a baroque engagement with the fold that challenges scale, distance and exteriority alike.” Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 53, 60. Similarly scale in buxey’s work forces a constant running of the eye over a patina of pores and blemishes which may seem to seep, as with the church’s marble veins, beyond the frame of her face.
51. The desire to touch some fragment of her revered remains led to a quite brutal pulling apart of Teresa’s body. Her head was severed, a fragment of jaw, one eye, a hand, an arm, the right foot and fingers from the remaining hand were ripped from the corpse. Ribs were pulled away and pieces of flesh were also widely distributed. Relics were also made of the rags which had been used to stem the flow of blood from her mouth when she died. Teresa’s heart was removed and kept in a reliquary
Sublime Love and Seduction, an Uncertain Requiem 167 for the devout to peer into. For a full account of these events, see Sackville-West, The Eagle and the Dove, 89-100.
52. Bernard was often ill, suffering from “stomach aches and frequent vomiting.” Kristeva, Tales of Love, 158.
53. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 151-169, our emphasis.
54. See Robin van Löben Sels A Dream in the World Poetics of Soul in Two Women, Modern and Medieval (Hove: Brunner Routledge, 2003), 186. As well as Hadewijch and her desire for God made body, this indivisibility of the corporeal and ideal can be detected in hagiography’s most decrepit saint: Lydwine of Schiedam. She acted out a communication with God articulated through pain and bodily suffering, and actively invited both: “Two boils formed, one under her arm, the other above her heart. ‘Two boils, it is well’ she said to the Lord ‘but three would be better in honour of the Holy Trinity’.” For this literary reference see J.K. Huysmans En Route (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2002) 38-39; see also his Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1923). Her decrepit body was, though, restored to perfection in death. In the desires of both saints to touch and suffer, the goal is a body ideal, but one dependant on its flesh.
55. St. Bernard, “Sermons Diverses,” Oeuvres complètes 5.40, cited in Kristeva, Tales of Love, 159.
56. Kristeva, Tales of Love, 159.