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| FUSELI 4 |
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"The Artist on His Departure" from Negotiations Towards a Self, 1770-1830
The Artist on his Departure from Italy depicts a figure, perhaps a classical statue squatting above Switzerland. Between this figure lies Italy and England. A phallus flies towards Italy. Mice lie in England. In a letter that accompanies this drawing, Fuseli writes, "Take heed of the mice!" This drawing condenses, in a succinct manner, many of the elements which are loaded into Fuseli's ceuvre: the classical statue, the competition in England with West and his disdain for the portraitists Humphry and Romney, the symbolic phallus of patriarchal and artistic authority which belongs to Italy, and the land of Fuseli's father, Switzerland. Like Odysseus between Scylla and Charybdis, Fuseli is trapped, his double, his stand in,
a frozen, medusalized sculpture, trapped by the gaze, ex-posed by the gaze. Fuseli, unlike Odysseus, unlike Homer, unlike the Ancient Greeks, however, cannot move. Instead, he squats. He shits. In shitting, Fuseli drops a load. Loaded from the bacchanals in Rome, he unloads, and in un-loading, he lightens his load. This un-loading allows Fuseli to carry his load. With this gesture, a gesture of defecation, Fuseli takes a shit, and, in shitting, Fuseli expels the phallus of artistic authority. It flees at the sight of this shit, this shit which Fuseli shits on his father's land, his father's authority, this shit which Fuseli offers as a gift to the nom du père. Fuseli does not have to slay the father. He merely shits on the father, for that is all the father is worth. In shitting, there is nothing to fear from the father, for the father, like the fragments of antiquity, like the statue that shits, becomes laughable. To the artists of England, to the mice, Fuseli will give them shit, not giving a shit, becoming a shitty artist, an artist who takes no shit from mice, but leaves them shit to eat. To the historian, Fuseli leaves only his shit, his remains, his paintings, and those who wish to revere at his altar, who wish to make holy relics out of h is shit, who believe in the transubstantiation of his art, end up looking like shit.
In a literal sense, Fuseli is a shitty painter, a poor painter to judge in the terms of connoisseurship. He may even be purposefully poor. His paintings have been criticized for a lack of knowledge concerning color and anatomy, yet there are instances where Fuseli displays what may be considered "brilliant" uses of color, and witnesses during his time and examples of his drawings show that he could depict bodies anatomically correct. It is Fuseli's drawings, more than his paintings, which are praised by connoisseurs today. Traditional historians, to save Fuseli from obscurity, would exalt Fuseli's mind, saying that his stylistic limitations could not meet the conceptions of his mind. In other words, in stylistic terms, Fuseli's art would have to be defended by focusing on his drawings and Fuseli's late introduction into oil painting, while, in the terms of subject matter and ideas, Fuseli's art would have to be defended by a recourse to his stylistic limitations and the paradoxes within his own doctrine. In other words, the attempts to justify, to defend Fuseli's work have limited themselves, a limitation, which I have suggested, is due to a narrow definition of translation as literal.
In the process of un-loading, however, Fuseli's offensiveness is not limited to his style, but extends to his speech, his obscenities. "There is no giving Fuseli without swearing." In the process of un-loading, in Fuseli's offensiveness, there is an offensive strike against the defenders of what is high, against those who wish only to exalt the inoffensive. "He who means to remain ignorant of the enormities of human debasement must remain ignorant of literature, history and poetry." (Henry Fuseli) In taking the low road, Fuseli un-loads the weapons of high culture by un-loading upon them an arsenal of baseness. He re-writes Lessing's Laocoön, in A Woman before the Laocoön, showing that it is not the expression of the central figure's face in the midst of struggle that is worthy of attention, but its genitals, a sign of bodily finitude. His work becomes synonymous with the "low." At the basis of this attack is an offensive strike against the non-offensive surface of high society, at that society painted by Reynolds and Gainsborough. This attack against the high may be a political strategy, at the very least it has political undertones, and this goes against the traditional reading of Fuseli's work….
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