>Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 18:37:53 -0500
>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>Subject: Caravaggio vs. David Hockney? (was Re: Butler)
>
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>Catherine Driscoll writes to Chuck Grimes:
>>Chuck Grimes responds to Yoshie's post as follows:
>>
>>>Any oppressed group wants to know its own history. Mastering history, it
>>>seeks to recover, master, and work through subjugated knowledge (how it
>>>came to be the object of oppression) and suppressed popular memories (how
>>>its forebears or predecessors lived, struggled, survived, and sometimes
>>>even won some victories). Foucault spoke very eloquently of how (and to
>>>whose benefit) popular memories of rebellions have been erased from history.
>>>
>>>The ruling class and its dominant ideology always seek to deny us our
>>>history and memories.
>>
>>with an invocation to compare Caravaggio and David Hockney.
>>Chuck, I can't see why this comparison would prove or disprove the claim
>>that Butler and Foucault have had effects on conceptions of sexuality.
>>You want to claim they have had *less* effect than other
>>things/ideas/people I think, but why? And who, exactly -- Hegel?
>
>I didn't reply to Chuck's post because his intent was unclear to me.
>Reading it again, I suppose he is giving us a familiar narrative of decline
>from modern to postmodern. If so, such an exercise has been already done,
>with regard to Van Gogh's and Andy Warhol's shoes, for instance, so I don't
>see any need to reproduce it. (This sort of narrative always reminds me of
>Oswald Spengler's _The Decline of the West_.)
>
>More specifically, Chuck seems to suggest the following (incomplete)
>equations:
>
>Caravaggio = __________ (fill in the blank)
>
>David Hockney = Foucault
>
>I wonder which writer Chuck has in mind as a superior 17th c. antecedent of
>Foucault who can be paired with Caravaggio (1573-1610). Shakespeare? Ihara
>Saikaku (1642-1693) who wrote _Nanshoku Okagami [The Great Mirror of Male
>Love]_? Any philosopher or historian? (In the 18th c., he can turn to
>Jeremy Bentham. See Bentham's essay "Offenses Against One's Self" (1785),
>the first known argument for sodomy law reform in England, according to
>Louis Crompton. Available at
>http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/events/sw25/bentham/.) In any case,
>isn't it silly to make this sort of comparison?
>
>BTW, what of Foucault's own taste? I imagine Foucault would have preferred
>a Caravaggio to a Hockney as a cover picture of one of his books. For
>instance, "Flagellazione." (Take a look at the JPEG attachment.)
>
>An aside to Chuck: Read, for instance, Richard Dyer on homophobia in Film
>Noir.
>
>Yoshie
>
>**********
>
>Chuck wrote:
>>>At the risk of sounding both pompous and pretentious, try making the
>>>following comparison. Go get two big art books at the library; one of
>>>Michelangelo Caravaggio (the one by Mia is good), and the other on David
>>>Hockney (there is a good one put out by Abrams). Set them up on a
>>>desk and open them to a large reproduction in each. Spend say, twenty
>>>minutes looking at them together.
>>>
>>>Then come back to the list and tell me Foucault and Butler, or David
>>>Hockney's equivalents have interrogated the nature of sexuality,
>>>sensuality, homosexuality, and their profound interconnections with
>>>psyche, history, and power. Think about how the mix of space and light
>>>on form and darkness have interpenetrated the entire western psyche
>>>through Rembrandt and others, on into film noir, and the high contrast
>>>photography of the mid-century, to fold these into the meanings and
>>>interrogations of depth in space as depth and nuance in sensibility
>>>and sensuality. Now, contrast this to Hockney's legacy in pasteled and
>>>flat manikins, doll cut-outs, pasted into pretty and decorously walled
>>>interiors.
>>>
>>>I brought up this comparison, because I decided to take a detour from
>>>Butler to Hegel and have about finished the sixty page preface to
>>>Phenomenology of Mind, the work Butler uses in the Bondsman and
>>>Unhappy Conscious sections of Psychic Life of Power.
>>>
>>>Chuck Grimes