Self-Appointed Victory: An Imaginary Conversation with Camille Paglia on February 26, 2009
Fictional interview with Camille Paglia, American author and social critic. Based on performance called Self-Appointed Victory.
Camille Paglia: I think it’s safe to say that we met when you read my book Sex, Art and American Culture, where I expressed my desire to rethink American cultural history through the heritage of my generation of the Sixties. My generation left its own society and religion behind in its quest for expanded consciousness. You said that you are exploring this legacy, its idealism…about social and personal transformation, and so on, and that you are hungry. Language is fruit and meat, physical, sensual, we can begin by sucking on the juice of our own dreams and obsessions! So, talk about this piece of yours, Self-Appointed Victory.
Janet Silk: Oh, great, Camille, this is…I’m thinking a lot about success and failure these days, especially in the “new economy”…[Janet and Camille chuckle quietly]…but mainly how to define oneself as a successful human being. Well, there is a Jacques-Louis David painting that has captured my imagination since I was a teenager. It is The Coronation of Napoleon. It shows Napoleon crowning Justine, in the ceremony where he declared himself Emperor… after the French Revolution. I mean, I don’t want to get into the whole issue about him crowning her…
CP: [interrupts] Yes, I hope you are not going to digress into the typical simplistic feminist attitude toward patriarchy, which is perceived as tyrannical oppression…
JS: No, I’m not speaking to that, I’m trying to understand the need for power and success. The painting is an example of intersections between the private, personal, and public witnessing of victory. More important to me is the story behind the event, which is that during the Coronation Ceremony, Napoleon literally crowned himself Emperor. It is the crowning of himself that I find intriguing. There are some great eyewitness reports…I relate to the audacity of Napoleon crowning himself as Emperor. I also love the Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painting of Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne, where you see the full-on regalia and accoutrements of his new role…and in particular…I fixated on the laurel crown, a symbol of victory, you see this a lot in Greek and Roman works. The laurel is really interesting, it’s connected with the Latin word “laus,” meaning “praise,” some stories I heard relate its origin to the first Olympic Games…a laurel garland was given to the winner. You can see a laurel crown made of gold in the Ingres’s painting. I mean, is there a real victory if it is self-appointed, or self-proclaimed? What if you just take it? Does the declaration have to be an agreement, or recognized, or witnessed by someone else, witnessed by society?
CP: [Laughing] I did tell you that when I was nine years old I dressed up as Napoleon for Halloween, didn’t I? I think that event you describe and Napoleon’s Coronation resonates as an example of our king-seeking energies: power-struggles, dominance and submission…a universal pecking order, the heroic. I mean, I have explored this idea of a hierarchical, pyramidal system uniting heaven and earth. Western culture has produced the best system for organizing and taming those king-seeking energies, okay? Do you really think you can get around the power struggles in your life by simply declaring yourself a victor? This is a naïve psychological game, a pedestrian denial of the reality of your situation and can be a pathetic gesture, unless, like Napoleon, you actually own tangible power and have the ability to keep it. As far back as I can remember, I was struck by the mystery of authority and leadership. The traumas of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation’s egalitarianism was a sentimental error.
JS: Well, the problem for me is that I’ve arrived at this point where I wonder about the value of all areas in my life– past, present and future. The last collaborative piece I did was called urvalue.com, all about self-perceived and socially constructed personal value, economic value, labor value…it was inspired by the life insurance calculations after the September 11th attack. The insurance claims calculated the net worth of a victim’s life based on a person’s future predicted earnings. Based on this prediction, monetary awards were given to the victims’ families. To me, this encapsulated the search for a criteria that defines your success. What’s my worth? What is my net worth? What’s my value? Where in my psyche do I retain this sense of value? How do I define it? Can I predict or control it?
CP: I went through similar questions when I was just so professionally crushed for so many years, I was totally invisible, almost obliterated, but I accepted this and took my authority from the situation. I had been saying my ideas for twenty years. No one listened. I couldn't get published. I couldn't get hired. My career was a disaster, but I didn’t blame it on anyone. I didn’t want to be a pandering careerist academic, I was invested in intellectual inquiry, in the grand tradition. I was an Amazon! I was always out there fighting and kicking and demanding and challenging authority. I was rude, my attitude was that of the Doors: “We want the world and we want it now!” I wore Frye boots, boots will certainly give you a sense of power, [fist in the air], a la Nancy Sinatra, boots are made for walking okay, and when the time came, and people were interested in what I had to say, I was intellectually and emotionally prepared. I was, like, “okay, let’s really have it all out!” It was war, it was theater, and I raised hell. I mean, I always raised hell, long before the political upheaval of my generation, I was making eccentric nonconformist gestures, but later, I had the power of media attention and suddenly, people were listening and understanding what I had to say. And it suggests to me that it is a kind of cyclical pattern at work, and we've gone through a full cycle, and we're coming back. Anti-establishment mavericks, such as myself, restored energy to the cultural scene. I think you have a bit of a victim mentality and this…is really…a kind of chic despair. I think you expect some kind of weepy handholding here. I think you find it necessary to work in reaction to other people’s judgments. What do you hope to gain?
JS: [Interrupts] No. no. no. I don’t want a weepy handholding session, Camille. I mean, it’s this stripping away of attachments or goals. [Pauses, closes eyes, tries to remember] It’s like that quote from [puts hand to forehead, pauses, closes eyes] the Bible, in the book of Daniel: “You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting.” It means that you have been carefully judged and found lacking. For me, this is an opportune moment to get out from self-inflicted oppressive regimes. It’s the disorientation that you have when you are forced to change, or your way of being in the world doesn’t work anymore, and then, like, if you’re lucky to see it, stagnation is not an option. Victory becomes this shift in awareness. You have to refocus. It’s a shift in strategies. Something is happening. You’re alive. Your perception expands.
CP: Okay, like, “The mind’s true liberation”? Now, I really identify with that line from the song Aquarius. That’s what I stand for. I am the Sixties come back to haunt the present. What I’m saying is that what happened in the Sixties was never fully understood, okay, I’m saying that the psychedelic element is not a joke…I’m saying that it was one of the most creative moments in Western history and embodied a meeting of Eastern and Western religion…I think this is a gift that we gave to your generation. It’s fantastic!
JS: Yes, I agree, and I love that song, you know, I grew up with it! [Hums song] “and peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars…this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Aquarius…”
CP: [Camille interrupts] My Sixties generation transformed the cultural landscape. We saw the cosmos and were awed by it. We contained every revolutionary insight, and, as I said many times, we didn’t need imported francophile ideology like that Gloomy Gus, one-trick pony Derrida: we had Jimi Hendrix. Yes, we wanted expanded vision, but we didn’t understand that we needed to move slower in order for real change to occur. Rapid revolutionary change can produce the counter reaction of conservatism or fascism; this is the lesson of history.
JS: What’s the value of transformative or revolutionary aspirations? For me, I became infatuated with the boundaries between Life and Art, questions that artists like Linda Montano and Teching Hsieh were into. I was interested in self-transformation as art, as a beautifying project, from the inside, and became heavily involved (not anymore) with a spiritual community aligned with Transpersonal Psychology, Sufism and Islam. I fell in love with the Sufi notion of “adab,” an Arabic word meaning something like a combination of chivalry, right action at the right time, manners and sensitivity. I wanted to apply this ideal to my own life.
CP: Uh-huh, okay, give me an example.
JS: Once I was standing at a bus station, and I was, like, watching this street woman, this crazy woman…this was the label I gave her in my head…and she started to pick things up on the ground. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing, I thought she was hallucinating. Then I realized she was picking up the trash. I realized she was modeling “right action,” and I had stupidly put her down. I had been standing at the bus stop for about half an hour, staring at the same trash, but she actually came along and did something about it, whereas I did nothing, and in fact, I just judged her.
CP: Now, that reminds me of the Zen Buddhist master kicking her student in her behind, it’s the right kick at the right time! I think religion is a metaphysic, a philosophical view of the universe. My generation experimented with Eastern religion, though we rebelled against the institutional church, we were very religious in our own way. I think you see this influence in the art of the Beat generation and in the art of the 60s and 70s. Especially the older Beat poets, with their disdain for material possessions, were a spiritual example to us. I think many performance artists were influenced by aesthetic quests for personal transformation, they applied themselves to endurance and the trials of physical pain. I admire this willingness for self-sacrifice, for art, and for putting the body on the line. I’m saying that our lives in the body are submerged in the Dionysian continuum of pleasure-pain. Happenings and performance art became rituals for people to participate in. So art returned to its prehistoric origins in ritual magic, and so on. It relates to the heroic. I mean, the travesty now, is the contemporary parody of this kind of work…for example, in Sex in the City, there was an episode that referenced the Marina Abramović piece, The House With the Ocean View, done in 2002, when she starved herself for a twelve-day endurance test in a New York gallery. At this performance, the Carrie Bradshaw character meets the artist character played by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Now, I find this an interesting subtext, a meeting of body-discipline aesthetics. The Abramović piece represents an aesthetic quest about endurance, personal transformation through discipline of the body. Examples can be found in the various grand yogic traditions; this is also connected to a monastic life and also to questions about the boundaries between public and private life. Also, there is the archetypical ritual of deprivation before orgiastic abundance. And then, Baryshnikov, one of the greatest dancers of all time, plays a celebrated conceptual-installation artist, a character loosely based on his own personae in real life: a rebel, a lover, a star, a genius, a god, okay? Again, the body…the laser focus of the dancer on perfection, the mastery of form and technique…the transformation of the flesh into beauty. This is the Western Art tradition, the cult of beauty. However, the Carrie character represents a popular feminism of the early 90s, which I detest, the woman who wants it all and negotiates her desire with men, who are somehow clueless. The show itself was the supposed first-time “real” representation of how women talk about sex, that is, explicitly and lustily…as if that is so shocking, I mean, hey, I’ve been pro-sex and pro-porn forever, okay… the only redeeming aspect of the show is its fashion fetishism! Check out those heels! [Kicks up her feet, fluffs her hair] But, no matter how hard they tried, and how much they talked, those women were neither sexy, nor glamorous, they were not goddesses…they were ordinary, unheroic, and whiney, okay? Really whiney. All of the characters struggled with aesthetics, power, attractiveness, money, but the show suffered because of its feminist naiveté. Women can’t have it all, biology compels everything, woman is limited by the body. I think the show demonstrated that women are confused about the value of the feminine…they are trapped in a princess mentality of snippy entitlement. I think it’s very, very bad to convince women that they have been victims and that their heritage is nothing but victimization. But, back to our conversation, before we lose track here, do you think you are entitled to success? Okay, maybe you simply haven’t worked hard enough! And, more importantly, can you revel in beauty? Beauty is an eternal human value. One of my earliest faculties was my responsiveness to beauty. It’s an Italian thing.
JS: Yes, sure, I can wallow in beauty. But it also comes down to that reality factor, as you said, like, getting paid. Like you mentioned, it wasn’t until many years after Sexual Personae was published that you were living debt-free. And for me, now, it comes down to economics and credibility. Because the sum total value of my creative life is my ability to track its existence on paper. Because the art profession demands, “How current is your exhibition record? Have you published? Why should I bother with you?” Because I earn a living in the arts my answers affect my income, it’s a political issue, and determines my validity as an artist. Last week a student of mine asked, like, why I wasn’t in the San Jose State University Faculty show, and, you know, I didn’t have a good answer. I saw what happened, but I didn’t have any expectations or a response because I know the situation was in part due to my contract…with the school…and in part due to my shortsightedness, and, also, because of the kind of art I do, which is not bound by a love of particular media, and, in fact, has been deeply inspired by Life-Art questions. And, because I am in some process right now, this makes everything fluid, it does not carry material weight, and the process has been weighed on the scales of the profession! So my questions don’t carry gravitas within the art discipline categories of the Art and Design Department. Can you hang your life on a wall? Where is the evidence of your accomplishment? But, when my student asked that, and when I reflected on the economic and political reality of not being included it really made sense why I have this motivation to declare victory, even if it is a theatrical and obscure victory, maybe even an abject victory, because so many people seem determined to evaluate the worth of my life, and my art, and I’m kind of sick of it, what I mean…
CP: [interrupts] Back to “You have been weighed and found wanting,” and so on.
JS: Yes, and I forgot to say earlier, I did fail my self-transformation-as-art project, because my teacher said I hadn’t learned anything; I was beautiful on the outside, but still ragingly ugly on the inside. So, I guess I have to reconsider all this extreme effort to manifest beauty! It is as [pauses, closes eyes] Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
CP: Okay, maybe you needed to fall from grace, like Lucifer, and, I mean, the individual decision of Lucifer was already predestined. There is a famous statue in Retiro Park in Madrid, Spain, have you seen it? It’s called the Fallen Angel, done by the sculptor Ricardo Bellver y Ramon, it shows Lucifer falling from heaven. You can see his painful horror at being condemned, at being cast out. That’s what we talked about, the moment where you are forced to see reality totally differently. I believe you need to take responsibility for the path you chose and stop complaining, stop this kvetching about the options you lost, and so on. And, okay, the approval thing is very much a trap, maybe something Freudian, for you, there. It seems to me to indicate a need for parental approval, an inability to take personal responsibility for your own identity. My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football. Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport. However, I do commend you for your search for enlightened consciousness, which you inherited from my Sixties generation, with its larger worldview perspective, and with its cultural influences from Hinduism and Buddhism. I think life will never be a utopian paradise of universal happiness; obstacles are met and overcome by self-discipline and self-criticism. Identity comes through conflict.
JS: Maybe there’s a connection, you know, between “the Fall” you mentioned and the victory. In reference to Lucifer, or Satan, I did read the "Kitab at-tawasin," by the Sufi Saint Mansur al-Hallaj. Hallaj’s interpretation of the Fall is that Lucifer refused to obey God’s order to prostrate himself before Adam because there was also an explicit order that nobody should worship any being or thing but God. So, Lucifer was caught in the dilemma between God's eternal will that noone should worship anything but Him, and His explicit order to fall down before a created being. Lucifer’s fanatical devotion becomes his deviance.
CP: Yes, God is all-forgiving, but will he forgive Satan? With my Catholic background, this questions appeals to me. Evil is in our hearts. The saints warred with themselves as well as God. In Buddhism, good and evil are not so ethical; it’s not about changing the world but about seeing. Salvation is attained by seeing reality totally differently.
JS: Well, maybe, I don’t know why there seems to be a connection here…in any case, I mean, maybe the prostration to Adam, or Man, or humanity is like the prostration to the man-made, the human-made, the artifice of art, maybe I had a problem with the materiality of art-making, it seemed beside the point, an easy gesture, not worthy of worship.
CP: Hey, I am in love with art and artifice! Long live the will-to-adorn! I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning. There is nothing passive about glamour, I’m saying, embrace dandyism and do your nails! “Mr. DeMille, I am ready for my close-up!” [mimicks Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.]
JS: Art becomes an abstraction, and to quote from the Book of Daniel, again, “the Gods have feet of clay.” Being-As-Art is strong in substance, but weak in foundation once you put it on the art market, or build your career on it. There is a demand for material evidence. So, I have to make things. Like, my students, who call themselves “makers.” I made several laurel crowns out of clay and glitter, that’s what we started talking about, remember, the Self-Appointed Victory piece. I went to the Las Pulgas Water Temple near Redwood City, California, because of the Temple’s Neoclassical style, and because the night-concert sequence in the Oliver Stone film The Doors was filmed there. I saw a connection between Classicism and the Sixties sensibility, both of which have been important to me. So the piece was, that I declared victory and crowned myself in the Temple!
CP: An homage to the Dionysian…yes,the Dionysian rhythms of rock have transformed the consciousness and permanently altered the sensoriums of two generations of Americans… in rock, Romanticism still flourishes. Now, how does the mind work? This is the real psychedelic question!
JS: Uh, yeah…back to Napoleon, and his self-crowning…he has become a stereotype for the delusional insane…
CP: Yes, the Napoleonic complex is an inferiority complex--an intense will to overcompensate for perceived failures…maybe we all suffer from this complex, we all desire this particular victory? What in the world can we do with the Napoleonic heroic ambition and glory-seeking other than to ignore it or debunk it, okay? Ironically, Byron uses your “feet of clay” metaphor in his Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, to condemn Bonaparte for his excess. To quote Byron, “…His only glory was that hour…Of self-upheld abandoned power…” the drive manifests, after all, as the Nietzschian will to power…would you say that art is a will to power?
JS: I don’t know anymore, Camille, maybe for you…[they both laugh] art used to be considered a will to truth. Well, you wanted to leave at 4:00, [looks at watch] which it is now, so I guess we have to stop eating from our banquet. [says this with an exaggerated, toothy grin] I am really happy right now, Camille, and want to thank you for your delicious generosity.
CP: Yes, of course. I believe in cycles, okay? And I think that artists should immerse themselves in art. Artists with a strong sense of vocation can survive life’s disasters and triumphs with their inner lives still intact. I think authentic values are those by which a life can be lived. As a tribute, I offer you George Herbert’s, “wreathed garland of deserved praise.” [Camille recites]
A wreathed Garland of deserved praise,
Of praise deserved unto thee I give,
I give to thee, who knows all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherein I live,
Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,
To thee, who art more far above deceit,
Than deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know thy ways,
And practice them then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give thee a crown of praise.
© 2009 The Author, Janet Silk.
Image credit: Jacques-Louis David,The Emperor Napoleon I Crowning Himself, The Pope Seated Behind Him,
1805-06, Musée du Louvre, Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
photo by Thierry Le Mage, image available at artnet.com
Camille Paglia is an American author, teacher, social critic, and feminist. Since 1984, she has been a Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1991, became an international bestseller. Camille Paglia is a celebrity, an influential and controversial intellectual who continues to challenge and provoke philosophical discussion in the humanities. Paglia has become a frequent contributor to various journals, making often-acerbic comments on art, culture, and current events. She has leveled some of her strongest criticism at feminism and political correctness.
Janet Silk is a an artist and has co-authored and published articles about her collaborative work, in Afterimage, Public Culture, and Leonardo, and has shown her art nationally and internationally, since 1985. Her collaborative artwork has been discussed in Snap To Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures; Women, Art and Technology; and Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. She received the National Endowment for the Arts/Andy Warhol Foundation Regional Initiative Artists Project Grant for a collaborative, experimental, public art project. Her article about teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, The Pedagogy of Failure in the Global Art Market, has been published in The International Journal of Art and Design Education, 30.1, (February 2011) and is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.
Janet Silk: Oh, great, Camille, this is…I’m thinking a lot about success and failure these days, especially in the “new economy”…[Janet and Camille chuckle quietly]…but mainly how to define oneself as a successful human being. Well, there is a Jacques-Louis David painting that has captured my imagination since I was a teenager. It is The Coronation of Napoleon. It shows Napoleon crowning Justine, in the ceremony where he declared himself Emperor… after the French Revolution. I mean, I don’t want to get into the whole issue about him crowning her…
CP: [interrupts] Yes, I hope you are not going to digress into the typical simplistic feminist attitude toward patriarchy, which is perceived as tyrannical oppression…
JS: No, I’m not speaking to that, I’m trying to understand the need for power and success. The painting is an example of intersections between the private, personal, and public witnessing of victory. More important to me is the story behind the event, which is that during the Coronation Ceremony, Napoleon literally crowned himself Emperor. It is the crowning of himself that I find intriguing. There are some great eyewitness reports…I relate to the audacity of Napoleon crowning himself as Emperor. I also love the Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres painting of Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne, where you see the full-on regalia and accoutrements of his new role…and in particular…I fixated on the laurel crown, a symbol of victory, you see this a lot in Greek and Roman works. The laurel is really interesting, it’s connected with the Latin word “laus,” meaning “praise,” some stories I heard relate its origin to the first Olympic Games…a laurel garland was given to the winner. You can see a laurel crown made of gold in the Ingres’s painting. I mean, is there a real victory if it is self-appointed, or self-proclaimed? What if you just take it? Does the declaration have to be an agreement, or recognized, or witnessed by someone else, witnessed by society?
CP: [Laughing] I did tell you that when I was nine years old I dressed up as Napoleon for Halloween, didn’t I? I think that event you describe and Napoleon’s Coronation resonates as an example of our king-seeking energies: power-struggles, dominance and submission…a universal pecking order, the heroic. I mean, I have explored this idea of a hierarchical, pyramidal system uniting heaven and earth. Western culture has produced the best system for organizing and taming those king-seeking energies, okay? Do you really think you can get around the power struggles in your life by simply declaring yourself a victor? This is a naïve psychological game, a pedestrian denial of the reality of your situation and can be a pathetic gesture, unless, like Napoleon, you actually own tangible power and have the ability to keep it. As far back as I can remember, I was struck by the mystery of authority and leadership. The traumas of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation’s egalitarianism was a sentimental error.
JS: Well, the problem for me is that I’ve arrived at this point where I wonder about the value of all areas in my life– past, present and future. The last collaborative piece I did was called urvalue.com, all about self-perceived and socially constructed personal value, economic value, labor value…it was inspired by the life insurance calculations after the September 11th attack. The insurance claims calculated the net worth of a victim’s life based on a person’s future predicted earnings. Based on this prediction, monetary awards were given to the victims’ families. To me, this encapsulated the search for a criteria that defines your success. What’s my worth? What is my net worth? What’s my value? Where in my psyche do I retain this sense of value? How do I define it? Can I predict or control it?
CP: I went through similar questions when I was just so professionally crushed for so many years, I was totally invisible, almost obliterated, but I accepted this and took my authority from the situation. I had been saying my ideas for twenty years. No one listened. I couldn't get published. I couldn't get hired. My career was a disaster, but I didn’t blame it on anyone. I didn’t want to be a pandering careerist academic, I was invested in intellectual inquiry, in the grand tradition. I was an Amazon! I was always out there fighting and kicking and demanding and challenging authority. I was rude, my attitude was that of the Doors: “We want the world and we want it now!” I wore Frye boots, boots will certainly give you a sense of power, [fist in the air], a la Nancy Sinatra, boots are made for walking okay, and when the time came, and people were interested in what I had to say, I was intellectually and emotionally prepared. I was, like, “okay, let’s really have it all out!” It was war, it was theater, and I raised hell. I mean, I always raised hell, long before the political upheaval of my generation, I was making eccentric nonconformist gestures, but later, I had the power of media attention and suddenly, people were listening and understanding what I had to say. And it suggests to me that it is a kind of cyclical pattern at work, and we've gone through a full cycle, and we're coming back. Anti-establishment mavericks, such as myself, restored energy to the cultural scene. I think you have a bit of a victim mentality and this…is really…a kind of chic despair. I think you expect some kind of weepy handholding here. I think you find it necessary to work in reaction to other people’s judgments. What do you hope to gain?
JS: [Interrupts] No. no. no. I don’t want a weepy handholding session, Camille. I mean, it’s this stripping away of attachments or goals. [Pauses, closes eyes, tries to remember] It’s like that quote from [puts hand to forehead, pauses, closes eyes] the Bible, in the book of Daniel: “You have been weighed in the scales and found wanting.” It means that you have been carefully judged and found lacking. For me, this is an opportune moment to get out from self-inflicted oppressive regimes. It’s the disorientation that you have when you are forced to change, or your way of being in the world doesn’t work anymore, and then, like, if you’re lucky to see it, stagnation is not an option. Victory becomes this shift in awareness. You have to refocus. It’s a shift in strategies. Something is happening. You’re alive. Your perception expands.
CP: Okay, like, “The mind’s true liberation”? Now, I really identify with that line from the song Aquarius. That’s what I stand for. I am the Sixties come back to haunt the present. What I’m saying is that what happened in the Sixties was never fully understood, okay, I’m saying that the psychedelic element is not a joke…I’m saying that it was one of the most creative moments in Western history and embodied a meeting of Eastern and Western religion…I think this is a gift that we gave to your generation. It’s fantastic!
JS: Yes, I agree, and I love that song, you know, I grew up with it! [Hums song] “and peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars…this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Aquarius…”
CP: [Camille interrupts] My Sixties generation transformed the cultural landscape. We saw the cosmos and were awed by it. We contained every revolutionary insight, and, as I said many times, we didn’t need imported francophile ideology like that Gloomy Gus, one-trick pony Derrida: we had Jimi Hendrix. Yes, we wanted expanded vision, but we didn’t understand that we needed to move slower in order for real change to occur. Rapid revolutionary change can produce the counter reaction of conservatism or fascism; this is the lesson of history.
JS: What’s the value of transformative or revolutionary aspirations? For me, I became infatuated with the boundaries between Life and Art, questions that artists like Linda Montano and Teching Hsieh were into. I was interested in self-transformation as art, as a beautifying project, from the inside, and became heavily involved (not anymore) with a spiritual community aligned with Transpersonal Psychology, Sufism and Islam. I fell in love with the Sufi notion of “adab,” an Arabic word meaning something like a combination of chivalry, right action at the right time, manners and sensitivity. I wanted to apply this ideal to my own life.
CP: Uh-huh, okay, give me an example.
JS: Once I was standing at a bus station, and I was, like, watching this street woman, this crazy woman…this was the label I gave her in my head…and she started to pick things up on the ground. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing, I thought she was hallucinating. Then I realized she was picking up the trash. I realized she was modeling “right action,” and I had stupidly put her down. I had been standing at the bus stop for about half an hour, staring at the same trash, but she actually came along and did something about it, whereas I did nothing, and in fact, I just judged her.
CP: Now, that reminds me of the Zen Buddhist master kicking her student in her behind, it’s the right kick at the right time! I think religion is a metaphysic, a philosophical view of the universe. My generation experimented with Eastern religion, though we rebelled against the institutional church, we were very religious in our own way. I think you see this influence in the art of the Beat generation and in the art of the 60s and 70s. Especially the older Beat poets, with their disdain for material possessions, were a spiritual example to us. I think many performance artists were influenced by aesthetic quests for personal transformation, they applied themselves to endurance and the trials of physical pain. I admire this willingness for self-sacrifice, for art, and for putting the body on the line. I’m saying that our lives in the body are submerged in the Dionysian continuum of pleasure-pain. Happenings and performance art became rituals for people to participate in. So art returned to its prehistoric origins in ritual magic, and so on. It relates to the heroic. I mean, the travesty now, is the contemporary parody of this kind of work…for example, in Sex in the City, there was an episode that referenced the Marina Abramović piece, The House With the Ocean View, done in 2002, when she starved herself for a twelve-day endurance test in a New York gallery. At this performance, the Carrie Bradshaw character meets the artist character played by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Now, I find this an interesting subtext, a meeting of body-discipline aesthetics. The Abramović piece represents an aesthetic quest about endurance, personal transformation through discipline of the body. Examples can be found in the various grand yogic traditions; this is also connected to a monastic life and also to questions about the boundaries between public and private life. Also, there is the archetypical ritual of deprivation before orgiastic abundance. And then, Baryshnikov, one of the greatest dancers of all time, plays a celebrated conceptual-installation artist, a character loosely based on his own personae in real life: a rebel, a lover, a star, a genius, a god, okay? Again, the body…the laser focus of the dancer on perfection, the mastery of form and technique…the transformation of the flesh into beauty. This is the Western Art tradition, the cult of beauty. However, the Carrie character represents a popular feminism of the early 90s, which I detest, the woman who wants it all and negotiates her desire with men, who are somehow clueless. The show itself was the supposed first-time “real” representation of how women talk about sex, that is, explicitly and lustily…as if that is so shocking, I mean, hey, I’ve been pro-sex and pro-porn forever, okay… the only redeeming aspect of the show is its fashion fetishism! Check out those heels! [Kicks up her feet, fluffs her hair] But, no matter how hard they tried, and how much they talked, those women were neither sexy, nor glamorous, they were not goddesses…they were ordinary, unheroic, and whiney, okay? Really whiney. All of the characters struggled with aesthetics, power, attractiveness, money, but the show suffered because of its feminist naiveté. Women can’t have it all, biology compels everything, woman is limited by the body. I think the show demonstrated that women are confused about the value of the feminine…they are trapped in a princess mentality of snippy entitlement. I think it’s very, very bad to convince women that they have been victims and that their heritage is nothing but victimization. But, back to our conversation, before we lose track here, do you think you are entitled to success? Okay, maybe you simply haven’t worked hard enough! And, more importantly, can you revel in beauty? Beauty is an eternal human value. One of my earliest faculties was my responsiveness to beauty. It’s an Italian thing.
JS: Yes, sure, I can wallow in beauty. But it also comes down to that reality factor, as you said, like, getting paid. Like you mentioned, it wasn’t until many years after Sexual Personae was published that you were living debt-free. And for me, now, it comes down to economics and credibility. Because the sum total value of my creative life is my ability to track its existence on paper. Because the art profession demands, “How current is your exhibition record? Have you published? Why should I bother with you?” Because I earn a living in the arts my answers affect my income, it’s a political issue, and determines my validity as an artist. Last week a student of mine asked, like, why I wasn’t in the San Jose State University Faculty show, and, you know, I didn’t have a good answer. I saw what happened, but I didn’t have any expectations or a response because I know the situation was in part due to my contract…with the school…and in part due to my shortsightedness, and, also, because of the kind of art I do, which is not bound by a love of particular media, and, in fact, has been deeply inspired by Life-Art questions. And, because I am in some process right now, this makes everything fluid, it does not carry material weight, and the process has been weighed on the scales of the profession! So my questions don’t carry gravitas within the art discipline categories of the Art and Design Department. Can you hang your life on a wall? Where is the evidence of your accomplishment? But, when my student asked that, and when I reflected on the economic and political reality of not being included it really made sense why I have this motivation to declare victory, even if it is a theatrical and obscure victory, maybe even an abject victory, because so many people seem determined to evaluate the worth of my life, and my art, and I’m kind of sick of it, what I mean…
CP: [interrupts] Back to “You have been weighed and found wanting,” and so on.
JS: Yes, and I forgot to say earlier, I did fail my self-transformation-as-art project, because my teacher said I hadn’t learned anything; I was beautiful on the outside, but still ragingly ugly on the inside. So, I guess I have to reconsider all this extreme effort to manifest beauty! It is as [pauses, closes eyes] Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
CP: Okay, maybe you needed to fall from grace, like Lucifer, and, I mean, the individual decision of Lucifer was already predestined. There is a famous statue in Retiro Park in Madrid, Spain, have you seen it? It’s called the Fallen Angel, done by the sculptor Ricardo Bellver y Ramon, it shows Lucifer falling from heaven. You can see his painful horror at being condemned, at being cast out. That’s what we talked about, the moment where you are forced to see reality totally differently. I believe you need to take responsibility for the path you chose and stop complaining, stop this kvetching about the options you lost, and so on. And, okay, the approval thing is very much a trap, maybe something Freudian, for you, there. It seems to me to indicate a need for parental approval, an inability to take personal responsibility for your own identity. My prescription for women entering the war zone of the professions: study football. Women who want to remake the future should look for guidance not to substitute parent figures but to the brash assertions of pagan sport. However, I do commend you for your search for enlightened consciousness, which you inherited from my Sixties generation, with its larger worldview perspective, and with its cultural influences from Hinduism and Buddhism. I think life will never be a utopian paradise of universal happiness; obstacles are met and overcome by self-discipline and self-criticism. Identity comes through conflict.
JS: Maybe there’s a connection, you know, between “the Fall” you mentioned and the victory. In reference to Lucifer, or Satan, I did read the "Kitab at-tawasin," by the Sufi Saint Mansur al-Hallaj. Hallaj’s interpretation of the Fall is that Lucifer refused to obey God’s order to prostrate himself before Adam because there was also an explicit order that nobody should worship any being or thing but God. So, Lucifer was caught in the dilemma between God's eternal will that noone should worship anything but Him, and His explicit order to fall down before a created being. Lucifer’s fanatical devotion becomes his deviance.
CP: Yes, God is all-forgiving, but will he forgive Satan? With my Catholic background, this questions appeals to me. Evil is in our hearts. The saints warred with themselves as well as God. In Buddhism, good and evil are not so ethical; it’s not about changing the world but about seeing. Salvation is attained by seeing reality totally differently.
JS: Well, maybe, I don’t know why there seems to be a connection here…in any case, I mean, maybe the prostration to Adam, or Man, or humanity is like the prostration to the man-made, the human-made, the artifice of art, maybe I had a problem with the materiality of art-making, it seemed beside the point, an easy gesture, not worthy of worship.
CP: Hey, I am in love with art and artifice! Long live the will-to-adorn! I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning. There is nothing passive about glamour, I’m saying, embrace dandyism and do your nails! “Mr. DeMille, I am ready for my close-up!” [mimicks Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.]
JS: Art becomes an abstraction, and to quote from the Book of Daniel, again, “the Gods have feet of clay.” Being-As-Art is strong in substance, but weak in foundation once you put it on the art market, or build your career on it. There is a demand for material evidence. So, I have to make things. Like, my students, who call themselves “makers.” I made several laurel crowns out of clay and glitter, that’s what we started talking about, remember, the Self-Appointed Victory piece. I went to the Las Pulgas Water Temple near Redwood City, California, because of the Temple’s Neoclassical style, and because the night-concert sequence in the Oliver Stone film The Doors was filmed there. I saw a connection between Classicism and the Sixties sensibility, both of which have been important to me. So the piece was, that I declared victory and crowned myself in the Temple!
CP: An homage to the Dionysian…yes,the Dionysian rhythms of rock have transformed the consciousness and permanently altered the sensoriums of two generations of Americans… in rock, Romanticism still flourishes. Now, how does the mind work? This is the real psychedelic question!
JS: Uh, yeah…back to Napoleon, and his self-crowning…he has become a stereotype for the delusional insane…
CP: Yes, the Napoleonic complex is an inferiority complex--an intense will to overcompensate for perceived failures…maybe we all suffer from this complex, we all desire this particular victory? What in the world can we do with the Napoleonic heroic ambition and glory-seeking other than to ignore it or debunk it, okay? Ironically, Byron uses your “feet of clay” metaphor in his Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, to condemn Bonaparte for his excess. To quote Byron, “…His only glory was that hour…Of self-upheld abandoned power…” the drive manifests, after all, as the Nietzschian will to power…would you say that art is a will to power?
JS: I don’t know anymore, Camille, maybe for you…[they both laugh] art used to be considered a will to truth. Well, you wanted to leave at 4:00, [looks at watch] which it is now, so I guess we have to stop eating from our banquet. [says this with an exaggerated, toothy grin] I am really happy right now, Camille, and want to thank you for your delicious generosity.
CP: Yes, of course. I believe in cycles, okay? And I think that artists should immerse themselves in art. Artists with a strong sense of vocation can survive life’s disasters and triumphs with their inner lives still intact. I think authentic values are those by which a life can be lived. As a tribute, I offer you George Herbert’s, “wreathed garland of deserved praise.” [Camille recites]
A wreathed Garland of deserved praise,
Of praise deserved unto thee I give,
I give to thee, who knows all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherein I live,
Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,
To thee, who art more far above deceit,
Than deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know thy ways,
And practice them then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give thee a crown of praise.
© 2009 The Author, Janet Silk.
Image credit: Jacques-Louis David,The Emperor Napoleon I Crowning Himself, The Pope Seated Behind Him,
1805-06, Musée du Louvre, Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY
photo by Thierry Le Mage, image available at artnet.com
Camille Paglia is an American author, teacher, social critic, and feminist. Since 1984, she has been a Professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, published in 1991, became an international bestseller. Camille Paglia is a celebrity, an influential and controversial intellectual who continues to challenge and provoke philosophical discussion in the humanities. Paglia has become a frequent contributor to various journals, making often-acerbic comments on art, culture, and current events. She has leveled some of her strongest criticism at feminism and political correctness.
Janet Silk is a an artist and has co-authored and published articles about her collaborative work, in Afterimage, Public Culture, and Leonardo, and has shown her art nationally and internationally, since 1985. Her collaborative artwork has been discussed in Snap To Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures; Women, Art and Technology; and Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology. She received the National Endowment for the Arts/Andy Warhol Foundation Regional Initiative Artists Project Grant for a collaborative, experimental, public art project. Her article about teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, The Pedagogy of Failure in the Global Art Market, has been published in The International Journal of Art and Design Education, 30.1, (February 2011) and is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.
