Sultán

Karel Zeman 1961)

Karel Zeman

Baron Prášil Jízda Pod Vodou 1961

Lotte Reiniger

Jack and the Beanstalk 1955

Gretchen Gammell

Detroit in Decay

Hernan Bas

LOLITOS IN FAG LIMBO
by Michèle C. Cone

Lolitas -- so called for Nabokov’s famous novel featuring a nymphet who knows more about sex (with both female and male partners) than her pedophile seducer imagined possible in bourgeois America of the 1950s -- are all over the place in contemporary art. But the skinny long-legged flat-chested kid whose mix of awkwardness and grace Humbert Humbert found irresistible is more likely today to be a boy than a girl. A certain role reversal has taken place, as today’s Lolita looks ready to defend herself with a fierce glance, and a gun if necessary, while her Lolito counterpart seems utterly defenseless and from a bookish other world.

Hernan Bas (b. 1978) is a leader in the new generation of artists who specialize in Lolito images, and his works in paint and video raise interesting questions. Is the "fag limbo" that he depicts merely sensationalist, or is it about "a serious reframing of societal texts," as the critic Robert Hobbs offers in his catalogue essay for "Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection," Feb. 27-May 24, 2009, at the Brooklyn Museum? And, more broadly speaking, does the neo-Lolita/Lolito phenomenon signal a changing social reality?

Bas hails from Miami and has Cuban origins. Acting out a variety of single-frame narratives, the "boys" in his paintings often wear Harlequin tights, ruffled collars, velvet gilets, billowing white shirts and similar signifiers of another time and another place. Their accoutrements are also coded "not contemporary." The dreaming hero of The Swan Prince (2004) is carried on a shell-shaped Venetian gondola led by swans. The velvet-clad gaunt young man of The Burden (I Shall Leave No Memoirs) (2006) swoons in an antique armchair. When one of Bas’ creatures listens to music (The Prude Listening to Love Songs, 2006), the sound comes from a 1930s phonograph. Even the artist’s painting style connotes the past, suggesting prior artists ranging from Egon Schiele to early Picasso and Matisse, as in Untitled (The Green Line) from 2005.

Not all of Bas’ work uses the ingredients of another time and place as code for distancing, otherness and nostalgia. Nor does his art always simulate, as it does in The Great Barrier Wreath (2006), the look of gay decadence associated with Oscar Wilde and Arthur Rimbaud’s ghostly alcohol- and drug-induced supernatural visions. True, the young fellows who populate the bizarre watery landscape of The Great Barrier Wreath lack signs of masculinity, are far too slim, vulnerable and oddly dressed to play tackle in any sport.

As for the environment in which the young boys play games, it reeks of male dreaming, including an excess of long-necked birds, sinuous pinkish tumescent tree roots, vertical trees, mountain peaks and the like. But the room-size black-and-white (indeed more dark than light) video installations also on view at the Brooklyn Museum, which include sound and a certain amount of floor paraphernalia, are nostalgic without emanating the gayness of the painted works. Their nostalgia refers to temps perdu, the years of youth.

Indeed, with the exception of the odd collection of used objects that Bas desultorily throws on the floor à la Cady Noland, the near life-size videos depict everyday boys doing everyday things, flying kites, swimming, maneuvering a toy sailboat, canoeing and -- yes --cornering a friend into sexual action. These are typical boys’ experiences lived or imagined in early adolescent years, a time of deep and sometimes passionate friendships. The Loveliest Song (2003), a painting about a young boy confiding his thoughts to a soul mate while the two are lying on a plot of grass, speaks of the kind adolescent closeness -- male or female -- that can indeed produce physical desire even if the participants reject it or are unaware of the notion.

So is the work merely intended for the gay viewer’s delectation? Bas is one of those recent art school graduates who has certainly homed in on a subject capable of ensnaring immediate attention, and he obviously has succeeded with the Rubell family who, ten years ago, began to buy his work wholesale, no doubt inspiring collectors and dealers in Miami, London and elsewhere. On a primary level, the works are sensationalist and coincide with what the public sees as a gay sensibility. But as Robert Hobbs points out, the paintings speak also of unstable urgings and sexuality. Hobbs quotes Judith Butler, who writes, "in the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a [drag] performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity. . . ."

At no time does the law of heterosexual incoherence apply more broadly than in the interval between childhood and adulthood that Bas deals with imaginatively and with unusual metaphors, under the heading of "fag limbo." "Fag limbo," the artist explains, "is a space where everyone is worthy of suspicion. Most heterosexual boys I know exemplify this new class of boys; it is a clique that flirts with the sort of ‘model’ behavior typical of what is considered to be a bit sissy." Bas brings unusual empathy to the fag limbo stage, its looks, its ambiguities and its secrets, and his art describes the feelings of an age group that is neither child nor adult, whose body type has something of both a boy and a girl, and whose sexuality endangers normative thinking, if not normative behavior.

In this interpretation, the persecuted adolescent who dresses differently and is the butt of ridicule on the high school playing field is given renewed dignity. The nouveau sissy, as Bas call him, is "a new brand of boy that has the space to move at its own volition, back and forth and in and out of fag limbo." I guess that’s what is called the sexual liberation of the adolescent male.

Bas is hardly alone in focusing on adolescents and their ambiguous desires. From Schuebbe Projects gallery in Düsseldorf, I received an exhibition announcement card with the reproduction of a painting showing a young creature lying pensively in bed, whom I took to be a girl until I checked on the web for other paintings by the same artist, Christian Schoeler. The title of his show, "Studies for a Boy Book," was a dead giveaway.

Last fall, at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York, a show entitled "ambiguous desires" mined similar territory with photographic prints of attractive kids. The photographer, a Russian named Evgeny Mokhorev, specializes in images of homeless children in St. Petersburg. Boys and girls pose for him half naked. One of them, a boy (?), is seen standing languidly against a wall, his long blond hair flowing down to his shoulders, his hairless torso in full view, as if ready to be propositioned by a gay Humbert Humbert as by a protective motherly female.

Depictions of youth would thus appear to be of transnational interest these days, and they are hardly without recent precedent especially in photography (Robert Maplethorpe, Larry Clark). But if the depiction of skinny adolescents is not new, what is new is their environment. The Lolitos of Mokhorev and Bas survive in a world without adults. Homeless in Mokhorev, abandoned in a limbo between heaven and earth in Bas’ The Great Barrier Wreath and On the Jagged Shores, the boys’ sexual liberation that Bas celebrates will be probably be short lived, and that may be why there is darkness and morbidity in fag limbo.

Michèle C. Cone is a New York-based critic and historian. Her latest book is French Modernisms: Perspectives on Art before, during and after Vichy (Cambridge 2001).

Letterio Calapai

Mary Fedden

Mr G

Victor Borisov-Mustatov

The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table contains twenty-one short pieces named after elements, based on events in Primo Levi's life. The pieces are chronologically ordered — two early short stories are inserted at the point in Levi's life when they were written — but they are independent and don't pretend to be an autobiography.

The linking of stories to eponymous elements is in a few cases purely metaphorical — in the opening piece the inertness of Argon represents characteristics of his ancestors, Sephardic Jews in Savoy. Levi worked as a chemist, however, and a thread running through the books is what it is to be a chemist, to wrestle with matter; the connection of the stories with elements is usually quite immediate, though sometimes circumstantial rather than substantial.

"Potassium" and "Hydrogen" centre on experiments Levi did as a student, "Nickel" on work at a nickel mine, and "Phosphorus" on a near-romance with a laboratory co-worker in wartime Milan. "Cerium" is about stealing cerium while in Auschwitz, to sell for use in cigarette lighters, and "Vanadium" about a post-war encounter with one of the German scientists encountered while working there as a slave. "Arsenic", "Nitrogen", and "Tin" are about adventures as a free-lance chemical consultant and "Chromium" and "Silver" are industrial detective stories, in which chemical problems are solved. And "Carbon" follows a carbon atom around the planet.

Rather than trying to describe how good Levi's writing is, I'll just give a sample. Here's a paragraph from the conclusion of "Nickel":

"And yet this story does not end here. Despite the many years that have passed, the liberalization of exchanges, and the fall in the international price of nickel, the news of the enormous wealth that lies in that valley in the form of rubble accessible to everyone still sets fire to the imagination. Not far from the mine, in cellars, stables, on the borderline between chemistry and white magic, there are still people who go at night to the rubble heaps and come back with bags of gray gravel, grind it, cook it, treat it with ever new reagents. The fascination of buried wealth, of two kilos of a noble silvery metal bound to a thousand kilos of sterile stone which is thrown away, has not yet died out."

The Periodic Table is a delightfully original work. This elegant Everyman's Library edition comes with a brief introduction by Neal Ascherson and a chronology of Levi's life, which help place the stories in context for those coming to Primo Levi for the first time.

Tim Anderson

King Henry 2008

Gus Giordano 2008

Primo Levi 2008

Khaled Takreti

Woody Allen

Gasping for air, my life passing before my eyes in a series of wistful vignettes, I found myself suffocating some months ago under the tsunami of junk mail that cascades through the slot in my door each morning after kippers. It was only our Wagnerian cleaning woman, Grendel, hearing a muffled falsetto from beneath myriad art-show invitations, charity squeezes, and pyrite contest jackpots I’d hit that extricated me with the help of our Bugsucker. As I was carefully filing the new postal arrivals alphabetically in the paper shredder, I noticed, amongst the profusion of catalogues that hawked everything from bird feeders to monthly deliveries of sundry drupe and hesperidium, there was an unsolicited little journal, banner-lined Magical Blend. Clearly aimed at the New Age market, its articles ranged in topic from crystal power to holistic healing and psychic vibrations, with tips on achieving spiritual energy, love versus stress, and exactly where to go and what forms to fill out to be reincarnated. The ads, which seemed scrupulously articulated to insulate against the unreasonableness of Bunco Squad malcontents, presented Therapeutic Ironisers, Vortex Water Energizers, and a product called Herbal Grobust designed to implement volumewise madam’s Cavaillons. There was no shortage of psychic advice either, from sources such as the “spiritual intuitive” who double-checks her insights with “a consortium of angels named Consortium Seven,” or a babe ecdysiastically christened Saleena, who offers to “balance your energy, awaken your DNA and attract abundance.” Naturally, at the end of all these field trips to the center of the soul, a small emolument to cover stamps and any other expenses the guru may have incurred in another life is in order. The most startling persona of all, however, has to be the “founder and divine leader of the Hathor Ascension Movement on Planet Earth.” Known to her followers as Gabrielle Hathor, a self-proclaimed goddess who is, according to her copywriter, “the fullness of source manifested in human form,” this West Coast icon tells us, “There is a quickening of Karmic feedback. . . . Earth has entered a spiritual winter which will last 426,000 Earth years.” Mindful of how rough a long winter can be, Ms. Hathor has started a movement to teach beings to ascend to “higher frequency dimensions,” presumably where they can get out more and play a little golf.

“Levitation, instantaneous translocation, omniscience, abil- ity to materialize and dematerialize and so on become part of one’s normal abilities,” the come-hither spiel lays on the unwary with a trowel, proclaiming that “from these higher frequency dimensions, the ascended being can perceive the lower frequencies while those on the lower frequencies cannot perceive the higher dimensions.”

There is a fervid endorsement by someone named Pleiades MoonStar—a name that would cause no end of consternation for me if I were told at the last minute it belonged to my brain surgeon or pilot. Acolytes in Ms. Hathor’s movement must submit to “a humiliating procedure” as part of a routine to dissolve their egos and get their frequencies jacked up. Actual cash payments are frowned upon, but for a little abject fealty and productive labor one can score a bed and a dish of organic mung beans while either gaining or losing consciousness.

I bring all this up because coincidentally, later that same day I was emerging from Hammacher Schlemmer, laid waste by obsessive indecision over whether to buy a computerized duck press or the world’s finest portable guillotine, when I bumped like the Titanic into an old iceberg I had known in college, Max Endorphine. Plump in midlife, with the eyes of a cod and sporting a toupee upholstered with sufficient pile to create a trompe l’oeil pompadour, he pumped my hand and launched into tales of his recent good fortune.

“What can I tell you, boychick, I hit it big. Got in touch with my inner spiritual self, and from there on it was Fat City.”

“Can you elaborate?” I queried, registering for the first time his natty bespoke ensemble and advanced-tumor-sized pinkie ring.

“I guess I shouldn’t really be jawing with someone on a lower frequency, but since we go way back—”

“Frequency?”

“I’m talking dimensions. Those of us in the upper octaves are taught not to squander healthy ions on mortal troglodytes of which you qualify—no offense. Not that we don’t study and appreciate the lower forms—thanks to Leeuwenhoek, if you get my meaning.” Suddenly, with a falcon’s instinct for prey, Endorphine turned his head toward a long-legged blonde in a micro-miniskirt straining to locate a taxi.

“Clock the apparition with the state-of-the-art pout,” he said, his salivary glands shifting into third.

“Must be a centerfold,” I piped, feeling the sudden onset of heatstroke, “judging from her see-through blouse.”

“Watch this,” Endorphine said, whereupon he took a deep breath and began rising off the ground. To the amazement of both myself and Miss July, he was levitating a foot above Fifty-seventh Street in front of Hammacher Schlemmer. Searching for wires, the sweet young thing brought her show closer.

“Hey, how do you do that?” she purred.

“Here. Here’s my address,” Endorphine said. “I’ll be home tonight after eight. Drop by. I’ll have you off your feet in no time.”

“I’ll bring the Petrus,” she cooed, stuffing the logistics of their rendezvous into the abyss of her cleavage, and wiggled off as Endorphine slowly descended to ground level.

“What gives?” I said. “Are you Houdini?”

“Oh, well,” he sighed benevolently, “since I’m deigning to converse with practically a paramecium, I may as well give you the whole schmear. Let’s repair to the Stage Deli and decimate some schnecken while I hold court.” With that there was an audible pop and Endorphine vanished. I sucked in my breath and clasped my hand to my open mouth like a startled Gish sister. Seconds later he reappeared, contrite.

“Sorry. I forgot you bottom-feeders can’t dematerialize and translocate. My error. Let’s just hoof it.” I was still pinching myself when Endorphine began his tale.

“OK,” he said. “Flashback six months prior, when Mrs. Endorphine’s little boy Max was at emotional ducks and drakes over a series of tribulations, which, if you count my misplaced beret, topped Job’s. First, this fortune cookie from Taiwan I was tutoring in anatomical hydraulics eighty-sixes me for an apprentice pie maker, then I get sued to the tune of many dead presidents for backing my Jaguar through a Christian Science Reading Room. Add to that my one son from a previous connubial holocaust gives up his lucrative law practice to become a ventriloquist. So here I am, blue and funky, scouring the town for a raison d’être, a spiritual center as it were, when suddenly, out of the ether, I come across this ad in the latest issue of Vibes Illustrated. A spa type of joint that liposuctions off your bad karma, raising you to a higher frequency wherein you can at last hold sway over nature à la Faust. As a rule I’m too savvy to bite on a scam like that, but when I dig the CEO is an actual goddess in human form, I figure what could be bad? And there’s no charge. They don’t take dough. The system’s based on some variation of slavery, but in return you get these crystals, which empower you, and all the Saint-John’s-wort you can scarf up. Oh, I’m leaving out she humiliates you. But it’s part of the therapy. So her minions frenched my bed and affixed an ass’s tail to the back of my trousers unbeknownst to me. Sure I was a laughingstock for a while, but let me tell you, it dissolved my ego. Suddenly I re- alized I had lived in previous lives—first as a simple burgomaster and then as Lucas Cranach the Elder . . . or no, I forget, maybe it was the kid. Anyhow, the next thing I know, I wake up on my crude pallet and my frequency is in the stratosphere. I got like this nimbus around my occiput and I’m omniscient. I mean right off I hit the double at Belmont and within a week I draw crowds every time I show up at the Bellagio in Vegas. If I’m ever unsure about a nag or whether to hit or stick at blackjack, there’s this consortium of angels I tap into. I mean, just ’cause someone’s got wings and is made of ectoplasm don’t mean they can’t handicap. Clock this wad.”

Endorphine extracted several bale-sized bundles of thousand-dollar bills from each pocket.

“Oops, excuse me,” he said, fumbling to retrieve some rubies that had fallen out of his jacket when he produced the cornucopia of greenbacks.

“And she doesn’t take any remuneration for this service?” I inquired, my heart taking wing like a peregrine falcon.

“Well, you know, that’s how it is with avatars. They’re all big sports.”

That night, despite a welter of imprecations from the distaff side plus a quick call by her to the firm of Shmeikel and Sons to check if our pre-nup covered the sudden onset of dementia praecox, I found myself skying west to the Sublime Ascension Center with its divinity in residence, a vision in Frederick’s of Hollywood named Galaxie Sunstroke. Bidding me enter the shrine that dominated her compound, an abandoned farm curiously resembling the Spahn ranch of Manson lore, she put down her emery board and got comfortable on a divan.

-from Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Trugenev

Time sometimes flies like a bird,
sometimes crawls like a snail;
but a man is happiest when he does not even notice
whether it passes swiftly or slowly.
-Ivan Turgenev