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In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. —Susan Sontag

1. Cy Twombly: Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1994)

The day after my brother died I taught the painting to a group of boys from a private school. I taught it badly. The painting is indescribable. Bright, but also a lot of white space. What I remember most is the way the room smelled. Fresh paint. And spring, like flowers and rain on pavement, trees and wind—in Houston it never gets cold. The gallery was full of smell. It was quiet. Melancholy and reverence. Sunlight through paper ceilings. Small children in private school uniforms, sitting crisscross on the floor. I was a writer teaching in a museum called The Menil Collection. I was teaching children how to look at things, how to write down what they saw. I was unqualified for such a position. My lesson plans were rudimentary: what do you see? Write it down. This pedagogy was especially inept when it came to the Twombly painting. It’s indescribable. I told them the title of the painting because it suggested a narrative, and I let them free write. It didn’t matter. It gave me a chance to look at the painting, to be in the room that smelled like paint, a room full of color and light. I was a bad teacher. Selfish. They sat on the floor, their hair sticking up, eyes darting around the room. I looked at the painting. I thought about my brother. He was dead. They scratched their heads, glanced up at the painting, returned to their own blank paper. They wrote something about a ship, and they named the ship Orpheus. And a man on the ship said goodbye. His name was Catullus. I think what I like about the painting is that it’s about departure. Goodbye Catullus, you are going somewhere—a place I have never been—and I can’t go with you. Goodbye Catullus, you are leaving me behind. You will sail straight toward that explosion of color, that weird blob of melted crayons. Be careful. I Googled it and read that the painting should be looked at from left to right. It ends in the disaster of color. Red, orange, yellow. Like blossoms. Or fireworks. I think what I like about the painting is that it is exactly what I would do if I were a painter, if I had a talent for painting. I would throw those colors together in the same exact way. Indulgent. I would write on the walls. It feels wicked, forbidden. I would like to do the wrong thing. I would say farewell—Goodbye! I would write Orpheus’ name in pencil. I spent so much time looking at that painting, but even now I have trouble remembering what it looks like exactly. I never tired of it. Each week, I dragged a new batch of kids to see the painting, hoping that they would like Say Goodbye, Catullus just as much as I did. They never liked it. They thought it was confusing, ugly, pointless. They couldn’t bargain with it. Couldn’t make sense of it. And I suppose that that was true—I don’t mean that disrespectfully. But each week I felt a huge sense of disappointment when I showed it to a new group of children. You don’t like it? Why don’t you like it? It’s AMAZING! It’s SO BEAUTIFUL! They scratched their heads. They wrote a story about a ship named Orpheus. I was not a good teacher. I was supposed to give them a prompt, but all I could do was show them the painting, point to it, and say SEE! Orpheus raised the dead with a song so sweet that even Hades had to relinquish, relent, and offer up Eurydice to the living. “His name is written on the canvas, by way of Rilke” (misquoted!). So class, this painting is about Orpheus, which means it’s about death and music. Farewell Catullus. You’ve left us behind. I keep coming back for more. Forever separated by canvas and time. A painting is two-dimensional. We don’t understand you, Catullus. Why would you leave? But we stand here, waving goodbye. Class, wave goodbye. And you, Catullus—never arriving.

2. Juan de Valdés Leal: Pietà (ca. 1557-60)

I stop in front of the painting because of the blood. I don’t know the artist. I know nothing about him. I look at the label next to the painting. The artist’s name is Juan de Valdés Leal. I sit down on a bench next to a small girl. I think we both like the blood. We sit. The painting is called Pietà, and I think that’s a sexy title. Pity and pathos and please for the body of our Lord. The body, as you can imagine, reclines in the mother’s arms. Her face is rigid and stern. Severe—pale and angry. Bitterness and gall. His arm dangles over her knee. A white sheet ensconces his pale body. Blood on the forehead. Blood dripping down his sides, over the ribs. A knot of white cloth at the groin. I wish the artist had exposed Jesus’ penis. The body of Christ. The whole body. It’s a dead body. If you’re going to paint the incarnation, paint the INCARNATION. Why be modest? Why be polite during this humiliation? His mother’s arm stretches out and away, as if she is casting a spell. And darkness is in the background. Rocks. A ring of wood, perhaps a basket? The little girl gets up and leaves.

❧

Tourists pack the gallery. They don’t pay attention to the bloody Jesus. They don’t really care. Just me. And the children, really, drawn to the blood I think. Bulls are drawn to the color red. I am drawn to the color red, too. I am drawn to blood. Because it is liquid. It drips over skin. Today, I notice that Jesus’ knees are bloody. As if he crawled on his knees on the ground. But, I thought he was nailed to a cross. A hole bleeds on his foot. I didn’t notice that the first time! I see into the foot. There is red flesh inside—like beef chuck. And I think of frying up the foot and eating it. Which isn’t far off from what my dad taught me in confirmation class. We are all cannibals, just like Hannibal Lecter. Here, take and eat the body of Christ. We should have fried it. Again children are drawn to the painting. A small girl looks over my shoulder, at what I’m writing, and then again at the painting. We eye each other for just a second. Her mother calls to her in Spanish. The girl looks at me, turns sheepish. We look at the painting again. What is it that brings children here to look at this dead body? El Greco is behind us. Shepherds singing the glory of Christ. But we would rather look at his embarrassment. Or, more accurately, his mother’s embarrassment. I feel embarrassed.

❧

Today I am tired of looking at the painting. It is the same since I left it. I know nothing about art. What is there to write? And so I just look, waiting for something to reveal itself. His nipple. A breast bone. Large hands. I keep thinking of sex, despite the blood. Or maybe because of the blood. Viscous. Like cum. A dark nose, as if he’s a Dia de los Muertos doll. Blood on the forehead. Probably from a crown of thorns. Tourists in the gallery, from different places. The painting hangs on a gray wall. I stopped first because of the blood, but what keeps me looking now is Mary’s face. A unibrow. How unfortunate. She looks ugly and angry. Jesus promised his followers things. What does it feel like to watch it all come to this? This painting doesn’t reveal Jesus as resurrected. He is dead, completely objectified. Caught in that static moment between death and resurrection. Was his soul in hell then, announcing his victory over Lucifer? Releasing the dead from the fiery gates. His body is very still. But Mary’s hand stretches over her son. Is she casting a spell? Two little boys are in the gallery now. They are laughing at each other, making jokes. Jesus once said, Suffer the little children to come to me. Here they are Jesus. They like your blood, but the rest is something to laugh at. Promises of miracles. The cloth gathered in Mary’s hand. She clutches it. Perhaps pulling the sheet over your body to cover it up some more. To mitigate the humiliation. The incarnation of her shame. Your shame. Her son’s shame. Hasn’t it all been enough, oh Lord? Hasn’t she undergone enough abuse? A Refugee. Poverty. Pregnancy. A husband who did not know what to do with her. A son, a criminal.

3. Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)

My mother likes to take pictures. She buys a camera. She enrolls in a course at the local community college. She takes portraits. She sets up a small studio in her house. She invites friends and family to come and have their picture taken. Her subjects act self-consciously; they pretend to resist the camera. They look down at the floor, demure, and mother approaches with her lens. Click! Click! Click! Flash! Mother takes pictures. She says she loves to make people beautiful. With her camera. I think about these things while watching Suddenly, Last Summer with Joel and my friend Matt. Joel wants me to see the movie because he thinks it is something I will like. He says, “It’s just a delicious campy dream.” My friend Matt loves Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, so he plays a game of deciding which one of the movie stars he resembles most. “Who am I!?” Matt shrieks. “Am I Elizabeth Taylor—nymphomaniac, oozing sex, wounded, dying for a cigarette?!” He turns to Joel. “Or, am I Katherine Hepburn, with my mid-Atlantic dialect!?” I consider the question: I believe he is Liz. We watch the movie and drink diet coke and eat a pizza. Of the two movie stars—Liz and Kate—I resemble Katherine Hepburn. I am controlling, bitter, and self-righteous. I have a mean streak. In the movie, Katherine Hepburn is creepy. I wish I could be as thin as she is. I would wrap myself in a white shawl, and usher Montgomery Clift (looking rough, post-teeth-in-the-throat car crash) around my gardens. I would feed a fly to the Venus flytrap. In the movie, her son Sebastian is dead. My brother died. There was a moment (I remember it clearly) when my brother turned beautiful. It was almost over night. Up until that point, my brother was ugly. A reclusive, irritated fourteen-year-old. Pimples. A big nose. And then one morning he descended the stairs and was beautiful. The White Knight of puberty. It was about the same time his portrait was taken for the school yearbook. I remember sitting in the living room, all my family members crowded around the coffee table, admiring the picture in the yearbook—the new beautiful boy. We were so proud of him. Mother took his photograph. Mother captured my brother’s beauty. His beauty was triumphant. In our house, his portrait is everywhere—on the mantle, on the walls, on the dressers. The house is haunted. I feel like the second Mrs. de Winter at Manderley in Rebecca. I do not compare well. In Suddenly, Last Summer, Katherine Hepburn’s house is haunted too. But she is not a victim (I see myself as a victim). My mother saw herself in my brother’s beauty (they looked alike). I saw what I wanted to be. Tadzio on the beach. All of us watching, entangled in sticky beauty. The best part of Suddenly, Last Summer is when Liz Taylor flashes back to the day when her cousin Sebastian died. Up until this point, the event has festered throughout the movie in a blind wound of the subconscious. Liz cannot remember what happened, despite Monty’s prodding. It takes a Dr. Feelgood shot of “truth serum” to get Liz to remember. It’s a long monologue. Spellbinding. Overwritten. Overacted. Perfect. Liz (perfect goddess!) describes her cousin’s death with sadistic precision: the locals at Cabeza de Lobo ripped him to shreds and ate him. It doesn’t get much better than that. Liz looks stunning in the flashback footage—a headband, a summer dress, a see-through white bathing suit. When she discovers Sebastian’s mangled body, like carrion on the beach, she let’s out a wonderful, throaty scream: “HEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLP!!!!!!!” Thank Jesus. It’s the movie’s cum-shot. What I’ve been waiting for. She falls forward, grasping at garden furniture—her black, steely hair like a curtain, blinding her. I watch this vulgar display of fear, grief, and mania. It pleases me. I am Katherine Hepburn and not Elizabeth Taylor. I am thin-lipped. I am demanding. I have perfect diction. I speak slowly when required. I faint at the sound of vulgar words, but I am secretly abject, rude, and arrogant. I look. I am not looked at. I contradict myself. I like perverts. I criticize perverts. I enjoy the act of judging. I close my eyes, recline. I listen. I am good at listening. I am good at remembering. But I insist on re-writes. I love the art of revision. Every gesture is as an opportunity to make something beautiful. Mother transforms people with her photographs. She makes them beautiful. I love to transform things too. I hate real things. I prefer facsimile. I love to edit. I love the smell of burnt rubber. I love the movies. I love Liz Taylor. I am not Liz Taylor. I am certainly not Sebastian—ripped to shreds on the Spanish Coast. Consumed. Shat out. Yikes. Cabeza de Lobo (OH HOW I LISP THE Z! CABETHA!) Mother stages photo shoots. She looks very closely. I am not the beautiful brother. I do not have blood-red lips. I do not have black hair. I do not have violet eyes. I am not beautiful. I do not have my photo taken.

4. Jean Genet: Un chant d’amour (1950)

Separated by a wall. A cut of brick or concrete. A line. Like Eurydice’s snake. Or the joined iambs of a poem. The edge. The event horizon. Where the gods march in glorious procession, along the rim of heaven, to look at what is beyond heaven. To look at reality. Truth. Beauty. Abstraction. Like Pyramus and Thisbē, they find a crack in the wall. A kiss on concrete. Tears. One man inserts a straw into the tiniest glory hole, unloads a plume of smoke into the other man’s cell. The line has been breached. Who is the woman tattooed on the beloved’s arm? Why does the lover have such long fingernails? Cock tapping the wall. Do you hear me? Cock tapping out a message. SOS. Line against line. Perpendicular. Silent dancing. Swaying of hips back and forth. If I am in the movie, I am the policeman. I like to watch. One by one, I examine my cloistered urges. The master of the Panopticon. A single, all encompassing eye (I?). The pupil dilates, swelling outward, thinning my iris. Keep count. This man’s cock is big. This man masturbates with a sheet. This man loves his body. This one is sad. This one is indifferent. Biopower. I see both cells. I see the beloved roused from ennui. I see the lover aching on the wall. As the policeman, I do not have a cock. Instead I have a gun, and I have an eye. Machines, for giving and receiving. I can watch. I use technology to simulate experiences that are buried deep inside my body, beyond the penumbra of bile, stomach acid, and blood. I put the gun inside the prisoner’s mouth because I cannot put my cock there. If I put my cock in his mouth, and not my gun, I become a prisoner too. His saliva would taint me, and I would be thrown into my own prison. I would lose control. But my gun is an acceptable substitute. I feel it there on his tongue, feel him swallow, feel him gag—though the gun is not my body, made of metal, I can use my imagination to feel the tongue lapping at the barrel. The movie camera, too, is a technology. Like a gun. It controls that upon which it places its gaze. Holds it prisoner. A stick-up, a robbery. It demands control. I am the director it says. Do what I tell you to do. The camera is a thief. It takes everything. And like the gun in the soldier’s mouth, it demands that the imagination make that which is not real into something real. It mimics somatic experience. The gun is not a cock. It does not feel the prisoner’s blowjob. Neither, moreover, do I feel the prisoner’s blowjob. His hands on my body. I do not feel the flowers in my hands. I do not swing them. I do not reach out with my hand to grasp them. I do not lie down on a bed of grass, rest my hand on a prisoner’s tummy, feel him breathe in and out. These things are not happening to me. But I imagine they are happening. And so the movie is a dimension in which pleasure occurs, available to me only through my imagination. The movie is a technology to make me feel good. The gun is a technology to make the policeman feel good. The cock is a technology to make the prisoner feel good. Medium specificity. The body is a technology of the soul: translator of light and darkness.

5. Jean-Michel Basquiat: Hollywood Africans (1983)

A) TRANSCRIPT (An undisciplined mind, lazy thinking): Hollywood Africans. Popcorn. Sugar. Sugarcane. Incorporated. Heroisim. Self-portrait as a heel. Seven Stars—which is circled. Blue and yellow and red, which are primary colors. But some text is green. I’m curious about the words that are crossed out, such as: in eighteen forties—but, oh no! It’s nineteen forties! There’s a crown, which I’ve seen in his other paintings. And gangsterism. It looks like wall paint. Uh, graffiti, which I think is something people have talked about with Basquiat, a lot—I don’t really know a lot about him. Except that he died of a drug overdose. That he was friends with Andy Warhol. That he was Haitian (I’m guessing). Um, well, you know, I saw a movie about him, once, but that was a long time ago. And uh, and I think there was something about him fucking Madonna. Uh, other than that, I’m not quite sure. There are three faces! Um, one with a hat on it that says Z. And uh, a hand cradling a chin, Paw Paw. Movie star. Prince. What is Bwana? Crossed out. Hollywood Africans crossed out. Hollywood Africans in Green, 1940. So, I’m getting a sense of, like, history, and…racism…in…the film industry…(END TAPE).

B) How embarrassing, to hear oneself on tape. I hate that sound of my voice: nasal, fey, pretentious (in the worst sense of the word—not ambitious, but a pretense of ambition). Lacking gravitas. Only a kind of reaching, a desire to seem smart when I am grasping at straws (I remind myself of Paul from Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case”). So clearly homosexual. A bully could pick me out in a second, hear the sound of my voice, and beat me up. I am afraid of my own voice. My father used to make fun of it, the way I said the word Actually. “Actually,” he would repeat, with a slight lisp on the T. How embarrassing. In any event, regarding the painting, I fear I’ve misread everything. I consult the painting and see that I indeed did misread something. Prince is really Prints. Unfortunate—I never realized that the two words really are homophones. Prints of the Prince. Prince is a word that has always made me slightly uncomfortable. I have been called a Prince. It was an insult. I think of Cinderella’s Prince, who looks like a buffer, taller version of Frankie Avalon. He looks very clean. The two waltzing around the castle gardens, asking each other: so this is love? But again, regarding the painting, I admit that my reading is very shallow, and it reveals nothing about the painter’s motives. Instead, it reveals a great deal about me, like a gross Rorschach test. Look at all my perversity, just bubbling up toward the surface. But how can I be counted on, with such a short amount of time, with so little knowledge of the subject I am supposed to analyze? What has happened to wonder? Bewilderment? What has happened to fear? (I’m thinking, now, of shepherds cowering before angels. “Every Angel is terrifying.” Isn’t that something that Rilke wrote? I may have mis-remembered that too.) I am given to self-flagellation now. Such an easy slip. From modesty to a delicious squeezing of pleasure. The rote, brisk slaps of one’s own self-hatred. I should not be encouraged to look at paintings, nor to express my ideas of what they mean. But, as I said, that is perverse. In its own way, it is slightly egomaniacal. It’s as if to say: only I am wounded, broken, and dull enough to be barred from such exercises. Shackle my hands and take me to the lobby of the museum, while the rest of the class enjoys its field trip. I will sit and stare though glass windows at the trees and sky outside and wonder on what beautiful treasures are located within this weird temple. Once again, I have placed myself outside the boundaries of propriety. Dirty hands and dirty eyes. Museums are very clean. I wonder who cleans them? I would like to be the one that cleans the museum. That is my contribution. Paintings give me anxiety.

6. Vincent van Gogh: Self-Portrait (1889)

Mother used to always say: everything will feel better in the morning. But ever since Adam died I’ve been depressed. My brother LOVED New York. I loved New York too, but I don’t really love it anymore. It’s too noisy and too fast and too opinionated. I am tired of arguing with everyone. I’m too old. I have had my fill of fights and bon mots and makeup sex, and so I drink a lot of coffee. I get heartburn. New York is ridiculous. This spring I went to Paris with Joel and I went to the Musée d’Orsay and I went straight up to van Gogh’s self-portrait, as close as I could get to it, and I stared at him and I loved him, because he had a crazy look on his face—which was the face my brother would make when he went off his meds. I am tired and depressed because everything feels redundant. I would rather live in Paris than New York, because New York is so expensive and it’s ugly. At least Paris is expensive and beautiful! I wish everything could be beautiful. And I don’t really buy the whole truth-is-beauty-beauty-truth thing, which is what Keats said. I prefer surfaces, like Susan Sontag and Oscar Wilde. Nature is just the worst. I hate natural things. I like cultivated things. I like fake things. Like French gardens and shaved pubes. Speaking of Oscar Wilde, when I was in Paris I went to Père Lachaise and I made Joel come with me and we were walking along the cobblestone walkways, which were really cumbersome and annoying, and I kept tripping and falling on Joel. And he kept tripping and falling on me. And then it started raining and Joel wanted to go back to the hotel. But I insisted on finding Oscar Wilde’s grave, because I wanted to be that kind of faggot—the sentimental kind, the emotional kind, the caricature—I wanted to be Anthony Blanche and Truman Capote—what Joel sometimes calls “not careful.” Yes! That is the kind of homo I am. Rain-soaked, mincing over the cobblestones of Père Lachaise, looking for Oscar Wilde’s grave. Joel says it with just a little tinge of disgust in his voice—“Sometimes you are just NOT careful.” I WANT to be not careful. It’s my strain of À rebours. Fantasy. But the kind with no money and a dash of immaturity. Selfish. Usually, there’s a bit of mental disease thrown in for good measure. We tend to be alcoholics. Or just sick in general—like, generally prone to illness. Sickly. My dad used to always tell me that I was sickly. “You are a sickly boy,” he would say. And I would try to explain my swollen glands and my runny nose. And he would say: “You need to work outside more. You need to get your hands dirty.” I had allergies. I HAVE allergies. I had poor gut health (now, I drink kefir). I couldn’t possibly mow the lawn! I had earaches. Think of Oscar Wilde, when he died in Paris. That’s me. I am Oscar Wilde on the deathbed. Ear aching. I went there too, to the house he died in. It was yellow and ugly, and I felt so sorry for poor old Oscar, but I also enjoyed the sick twist of fate. Ugliness is such a terrible thing. And I had my picture taken outside of his house—that ugly, awful house. The house used to be a part of the trashy section of Paris, and now it’s full of multi-million dollar homes. How unfortunate! It’s all in the timing. My brother never went to Paris because he never had enough money. My brother never had enough money for anything. And then he died. It is an ugly thing. When Adam went crazy he had to go to Bellevue and then to a halfway home out on Long Island. Ugly wallpaper. In Paris, Joel had to go to the National Archives, so I went to the Place de la Concorde, and I pretended I was Marie Antoinette, brought to have my head chopped off. I stood there and stared out, and I considered all the ways that the world had wronged me. I clutched my umbrella. I was a beautiful victim. And I realized that I was going to die, right there, in front of the screaming crowds, and I thought “My God! It’s actually going to happen. I am going to die! They told me it was possible! And yet (HÉLAS!) I never believed them!” Adieu, I said to the passersby. Adieu Marie-Thérèse! They kept walking. Adieu Louis-Charles! Adieu Petit Trianon! Adieu Grand Trianon! Adieu Versailles. And the card games and the topiaries and the fêtes and the sleepless nights we walked on the cobblestone court leading up to the golden gates. Adieu Paris! Adieu France! Adieu world! Adieu! Adieu! 

Patrick Clement James’ Six Essays for Six Works of Art appears in Flock 22.

Patrick Clement James is currently a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and teaches in the English department at Brooklyn College. His poetry and essays have appeared in Gigantic Sequins, Assaracus, Grist, Barrow Street, The Cincinnati Review, The Mid-American Review, and Sequestrum. He is also a contributing music critic for Parterre Box.