The Origin of the World was not a destination; it was just another note on the scale of looking at bodies. The French artist Orlan showed this by copying the painting, but replacing the vulva with an erect penis and calling it The Origin of War. The British painter Francis Bacon zoomed out from genitals to portray his lovers as escapologists, wriggling out of their own bag of knees and knuckles.
Bacall’s look, Romeo and Juliet’s fish tank glimpse, Actaeon’s tragic accident, Manet’s wrong-footing lunch, Courbet’s close-ups, Bacon’s male wrestling: looking at bodies is an ongoing fascination. In the 1930s the film-maker and Nazi sympathiser Leni Riefenstahl pictured naked bodies with awe and classical grandeur, as if they were David; five decades later, despite years of denazification, and long after it was possible for her to hang on to any of the ideas of the Hitler times, she was in Africa, again photographing young people naked and heroic, with the same aesthetic as before, as if Auschwitz-Birkenau had not happened, as if her filming bodies was still just her filming bodies. Her fascination had become stuck, unresponsive to changing times. Hers was a female gaze which led nowhere, or to bland, heroic idealism. If our theme in this chapter is the road that looking takes us on, hers was a dead end.
Elsewhere, the female gaze was far more of an adventure. We have already said that looking at bodies is a force field and a bumpy road, but this image from Claire Denis’s film Beau travail (shot by Agnès Godard) makes us mix metaphors again and say that it is like a war zone.
What would a teenager think of this? Eight soldiers are too well posed to be dead. In the film we have seen them circle each other and fight, now four are topless, their legs spread, as if struck by lightning, or supplicants to some wrathful god, or willing to submit to the political and erotic imagination of a film-maker who was brought up in West Africa and wants to turn the tables on men looking at women. But if Denis had been standing really close to one of these men, or filming in the 1920s or 1930s, or trying to show what it would feel like to be in love with him, she might have used the soft focus that we saw in Chapter 1, the focus of the look of love. Instead, she makes it look like they are doing snow angels in the sand. Their poses serve no rational purpose. Instead, the image is reaching towards abstraction.
ABSTRACT LOOKING
Maybe that is what desirous looking really is; maybe that is what Juliet saw in Romeo, or Michelangelo saw in his slab of marble or our Renaissance teenager sees as she grapples with the disruptive power of erotic looking – an abstraction, a journey from a body to an idea. Teenage minds come to terms with both. In the 1000s CE, the Chinese painter Sung Ti advised a fellow painter to throw a sheet of white silk over an old stone well. He should then gaze at the sheet day and night, as it billows in the breeze and as the clouds cast shadows on it, until he starts to see, in its creases, the formations of a landscape – mountains, ravines and rivers. ‘Get all these things into you,’ continued Sung, and his advisee would see in the sheet ‘men, birds, plants and trees’. More than four hundred years later, in his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci gave similar advice:
Look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour . . . you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods . . . expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things.
Later in the same book Leonardo writes that looking at clouds can stimulate our imaginations.
Imagine, then, that as Yves Klein looked up at his blue sky, clouds came. A watercolour painting of them would look something like this.
A few moments after this painting was completed, the very same cloudscape was photographed with the digital zoom of a phone camera, and the result was this.
Pixelated, grey becoming dark and purple, like a bruise – what could be called an automatic abstraction. The journey from real clouds to abstract shapes was unplanned. Minutes after the skyscape was painted, the photograph was taken. We perhaps like to think that as abstract art became famous in the twentieth century, human beings started looking abstractly then too, but Sung and Leonardo were talking about looking abstractly centuries ago, and the earliest sculptures show that stylised looking is very old indeed. Take this Iron Age sculpture from La Spezia, Italy.
No human or animal looks like this, but that does not mean that its lack of realism is a failure on the artist’s part. The U nose is not trying to look exactly the same as a nose or beak that appears in nature. The sculptor has looked at real noses, then tried to make something that is visually distant from, but evocative of, a nose or beak. The same with the far-apart eyes and the oval head. The result is simplified, graphic, detached and other.
Early sculptures often purposely stylise in this way. They show that Klein, or a baby carried on her dad’s back looking up at the sky, had a tendency to tune out from the specifics of what they are seeing into something more generalised. The sculpture is semi-abstract the way the digital photograph of clouds is semi-abstract. In his book Visual Thinking, German theorist Rudolf Arnheim compared this Corot painting of mother and child . . .
Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation
. . . with this Henry Moore sculpture of two objects, the larger one on the right leaning over the smaller one on the left.
The painting is specific about costume, hair and location. Nothing in the sculpture can be said to have a specifically human subject, yet the visual connection to the painting seems true. Like the designers in the previous chapter, Arnheim is pointing to an essence, an underlying form. Corot paints the fuselage, Moore sculpts the engine that lies beneath it.
The face with the U nose shows that people have always done such looking. Abstraction has not just been an occasional destination of looking, or an idea exclusively for learned lookers; it seems to be a product of looking. In the same era that the face with the U nose was made, and thirteen hundred years before Cleopatra, the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten. He did so because he had undergone a religious conversion. He had rejected the old Egyptian theology which worshipped the Moon, stars and other heavenly bodies, and become entranced by the most visible body of all, the Sun – Aten – a disc god, which he saw as a godhead. This relief sculpture from 1375– 54 BCE shows Akhenaten on the left and his wife Nefertiti on the right, radiated by the Sun. They have eyes only for themselves and it. Its beams of light travel from it, out into the world, and into the eyes of the people, as in a child’s drawing of the Sun.
The man and woman’s three daughters wriggle for attention. Their son Tutankhaten, who later