The Unexamined Brutality

The Unexamined Brutality (of the male Libido), 70 x 50 cm, Oil on Canvas

This painting seems to hark back to times when the male libido was seemingly more unabashed and comparative innocence (or unabashed guilt) reigned the abusive intercourse between the sexes. The aesthetics are reminiscent of surrealist inspired propaganda imagery. Phallic forms abound. One sea shell stands, or lies, in lieu of the womb. One could argue that the central phallic form of the outer shell of the engine’s boiler is actually esemplastic in not only being the threatening phallus, but also the tubular receptacle hollowness, awaiting the phallic thrust of another longish form entering (see the old chuckle arousing locomotive/tunnel imagery). The ?-voiced Commentator “ex”plains: seeming nostalgia for simpler times does not thinly veil, but starkly outline the fact that we today live in the age where all old violence and abuse bears fruit. The true objectification of the woman takes place in the immediate future which is our presence. Groping will soon be replaced by more sophisticated (and cowardly) methods of abuse. Think about artificial intelligence being furnished with female faces, names, voices. Some are discussing whether these undead freaks should be taught to give more assertive responses to weather queries mixed with risqué innuendo and sexual abuse. Few discuss who decided that “virtual” assistants need female voices and whether it is not a very small step for the brutality of the male libido to then confuse the (universal) assistance offered with the liberties allowed by sex-slavedom.

Observe the more hopeful aspect of the depicted scenery, embodied by a disinterested spectator, a floating space vehicle in the rose tinted sky, watching the travesty on the ground with detached amusement. Maybe the dream of space insemination is not so very unbrutal. The shape and form of the device and its detachment, however, might be. The utopia offered by space.
Future © of this nostalgia-tinted painting by Torsten Slama and the Instrumentality of the Model Railroading Board

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The World of the (Non-) Euclidean Central “I”

The World of the (Non-) Euclidean Central ”I” [42×29,7cm, 2013]

The  (Non-) Euclidean Central “I”. Something so abstract, elusive and yet so intimate.  Inside: the perfect sphere, round and immeasurable, protected by the glass pyramid of calculation. The inner walls of the fleshly host incrusted with calcifications, crystallizations, soft matter transformed into hard, dead matter. Undertake one bungling step through the apartment of your self with the lights turned off.

[…] after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, “Warren, are you there?”, and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing—that voice—nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And this is what it said:
“YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!”

 

(Howard Phillips Lovecraft, The Statement of Randolph Carter, 1919

Dionysian Cult Centre with 1911 Renault 2-Seater

Dionysian Cult Centre with 1911 Renault 2-Seater
(297 × 420mm, pencil, coloured pencil, acrylics on paper, © 2013 by the Tellurian Society)

The title and conceptual framework of this drawing ought to be understood before the background of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s work on matriarchy and gynaecocracy, Das Mutterrecht. According to Bachofen, human civilisation went through three stages: a wild nomadic, tellurian stage, the “lunar” period of female supremacy, then the backlash of the Dionysian period, worshipping the phallus, favouring the anus over the vagina, favouring intoxicating masculine wine over female milk and honey, followed by the Apollonian period, modernity, the age of reason and necrophilia (now in a process of dissolution, entering the enigmatic, presumably female, Aquarian stage).

The depicted cult centre is of the Dionysian-Apollonian type*. It offers safe outlets for the Dionysian impulses of domesticated Apollonian Males. Wild, intoxicated, sex-crazed orgies are not to be expected here, these are relegated to Bacchantian cult centres, the dance-clubs, as opposed to the model railway, antique car, or life steam clubs, which are all part of the Dionysian-Apollonian category. This Dionysian Cult Centre is a place where playful, supposedly harmless necrophilia is taking place. Necrophilia is the supremacy-oriented form of sexuality ascribed to men by the combined forces of Dionysus and Apollo. We ought to bear in mind that quartz watches, pocket calculators, microcomputers, laptop computers, tablet computers, cell phones, “smart” phones, and many types of cars and mechanical devices (also child pornography and tame popular music) are all part of the large necrophiliac outlet device network for Dionysian impulses. Soon these cult centres will be demolished all over the world, relegated to the dust heap of history, as we enter a new age which will put an end to the ill-regulated sun-worshipping** Apollonian rationality so inseparably tied to frenzied Dionysus, and bring forth the real, biophile rationality of the well-regulated, tellurian woman-god-serving era of the moon and the atom again.Illustrative sketch and explanatory note © 2013 by Torsten Slama

*In fact, the author is struggling here with the drawing’s title. It seems that what is depicted is clearly an Apollonian-Dionysian cult centre.

**See also Lewis Mumford’s concept of sun worship, worship of speed, empty space.llustrative sketch and rumination © 2013 by Torsten Slama