The Digital Sublime of Feminine Spectacle in Busby Berkeley’s Footlight Parade and Roy Lichtenstein’s Nudes with Beach Ball: Female Flesh Represented as Conceptualized Kinesthesia in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

VOLUME 5 ISSUE 2 The International Journal of the Image __________________________________________________________________________ The Digital Sublime of Feminine Spectacle in Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade and Roy Lichtenstein's Nudes with Beach Ball Female Flesh Represented as Conceptualized Kinesthesia in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction CHIA-WEN KUO ONTHEIMAGE.COM THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE www.ontheimage.com First published in 2014 in Champaign, Illinois, USA by Common Ground Publishing LLC www.commongroundpublishing.com ISSN: 2154-8560 © 2014 (individual papers), the author(s) © 2014 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the applicable copyright legislation, no part of this work may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com. The International Journal of the Image is peer-reviewed, supported by rigorous processes of criterionreferenced article ranking and qualitative commentary, ensuring that only intellectual work of the greatest substance and highest significance is published. The Digital Sublime of Feminine Spectacle in Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade and Roy Lichtenstein's Nudes with Beach Ball: Female Flesh Represented as Conceptualized Kinesthesia in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Chia-wen Kuo, National Cheng-chi University, Taiwan Abstract: Roy Lichtenstein once explained that the use of chiaroscuro through Ben-Day dots in his art is a maneuver to emphasize the gap between reality and convention. Female flesh in his works, such as “Nudes with Beach Ball,” becomes conceptualized in a kinesthesia of light and shadow, and is also embodied through the quantity of the Ben-Day dots. Similar features also pervade in Busby Berkeley's musicals, such as “Footlight Parade”, in which female bodies become impersonalized modules of lifeless objects, such as a flower or a waterfall. Despite the criticism that Berkeley's representation of female bodies has received as a visual fetishization of women on screen, his works actually contain a pleasure of Kantian disinterest, as the female flesh is quantified into a form of desexualized purity, which is almost sublime and beyond any ideological bias. These hyper-feminine spectacles in Berkeley and Lichtenstein’s works deliver a postmodern transcendence by concealing the traces of human endeavors during the process of making art. In the age of “mechanical reproduction,” human flesh loses its aura and gets quantified for the awe of the digital sublime, which was prophesied by Berkeley during the thirties and consummated by Lichtenstein in the nineties. Keywords: Kantian Disinterest, Digital Sublime, Quantification of Mechanical Reproduction Roy Lichtenstein’s Optical Kinaesthesia in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction W alter Benjamin speaks about the concept of mimes in the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by mentioning Greek craftsmanship, which emphasizes the quantitative productions of things through founding and stamping. Second, the subsequent development of lithology created ‘the process of pictorial reproduction,’ and films, later on, showcased a sense of synchronicity, as speech is paced with moving images, just like an eye looking into a lens. The notion of process-reproduction invites a sense of independence in art-making, while photography catalyzes the potentiality in an art-piece that was previously absent. Thus, situations are made even more perceptible since the lenses lay bare what is inaccessible to a naked eye, and copies become more expressive than their originals. Speaking of the value of originality, the idea of ‘aura’ is a Renaissance invention glorifying the cult of beauty in art that purposely widens the distance between the viewer and the art-object just to form a ‘secularized ritual’ in honour of ‘authenticity.’ The attributes of ‘uniqueness and permanence’ in the ‘aura’ of classical art are sacrificed in order to attain a state of ‘transitoriness and reproducibility.’ The new form of art in the age of mechanical reproduction aims to reach a condition of ‘universal equality’ by statistical manifestation.1 Here art becomes more conceptualized, as well as liquefied, in a consummated state of the digital sublime. When it comes to art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Roy Lichtenstein orchestrates a dialect of commercial art, paying his adoration on ‘the energy and the impact that it has, and the directness and a kind of aggression and hostility that comes through it (commercial art).’ The edgy expressivity in commercial art is not a commentary but a consistent visual image which 1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 217-20. The International Journal of the Image Volume 5, 2014, www.ontheimage.com, ISSN 2154-8560 © Common Ground, Chia-wen Kuo, All Rights Reserved Permissions: cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE deliberately flattens out all the emotions even in themes concerning wars, love and hate, and Lichtenstein uses his art to celebrate such ‘universal equality’ by an impersonal detachment, which is amplified through his increasingly frequent use of regularized Ben-Day dots in his art.2 It was by the nineties when Lichtenstein started to explore the domain of female nudity. As his sixties pin-up girls are the representation of commercial archetypes, Lichtenstein recycled those archetypes in his previous works then had them stripped naked and encompassed by their own mirror-reflections within a reminiscent interior design. The infiltration of Ben-Day dots in his female nudes is carefully devised with the chiaroscuro effect to achieve a condition of autonomy in these art-pieces. Ben-Day dots add up a sense of three-dimensionality by making ‘something ephemeral completely concrete.’3 They are ‘cold, static and impersonal’4 – the idiosyncrasies of Roy Lichtenstein’s art. The bodily flesh ceases to look real also because of the Ben-Day dots, and the use of ‘chiaroscuro based on graduated dots and local colour’ underscores ‘the separation between reality and artistic convention.’ 5 Figure 1 (Left) and Figure 2 (Right) Human flesh, along with mirrors and interior/exterior surroundings, are all turned into objects in the process. Flatness means nothing but a patronizing signifier of visual images. The artistic autonomy formulated by the regularized use of Ben-Day dots renders a freedom, a personalized freedom like a person putting on his/her makeup. Somehow it's more than just freedom but a sense of control, as Lichtenstein remarks: ‘your personal makeup is your freedom . . . your purpose is your control.’ 6 In this case, art is no longer threshold to the visible world but the things themselves: ‘My use of evenly repeated dots and diagonal lines and uninflected colour areas suggest that my work is right where it is, right on the canvas, definitely not a window into the world.’7 The geometrical lines and standardized dots channel a postmodern spirit of statistical quantifications, but it's more than a dalliance with ‘geometrical abstraction’ but a choice of self-expression provoked by the manipulation of the spectator's ‘perceptual apparatus.’8 The juxtaposition of Ben-Day dots with human flesh conjures a unified indifferentiation between man and objects without completely paralyzing the spectator's perceptual apparatus. Lichtenstein merely aims to disturb as well as defy our common understanding of art by inserting the methodology of optical art within his art-pieces. Camille Morineau, The Exhibition – Roy Lichtenstein, 12. Ibid, 14. 4 Jack Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, 16. 5 Camille Morineau, The Exhibition – Roy Lichtenstein, 48.. 6 Jack Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, 26. 7 Ibid, 52. 8 Cyril Barrett, An Introduction to Optical Art, 9. 2 3 8 KUO: THE DIGITAL SUBLIME OF FEMININE SPECTACLE Figure 3 (Left) and Figure 4 (Right) According to Cyril Barrett, optical art intends to jeopardize the spectator's perceptual apparatus to the extent that he's unable to put an order in the exterior images he perceives with his eyes. Despite the meticulous deployment of optical art over our visual senses, optical art is subordinated to representations. 9 Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots by themselves represent a series of optical-kinetic movements from the characters of his pictures. Optical art manoeuvres to annihilate ‘the individual identity of the dots’ as well as the distance between the spectator and the object, and it challenges not only the forms of art-making but also the spectator's visceral conceptualization of the world in the visual domain: ‘They are kinetic insofar as they move, or rather appear to move and optical in that the impression of movement is brought about by certain physiological reaction.’10 Simply put, optical art focuses on the stuff within - the viewer's ‘physiological reaction,’ as Lichtenstein declares, ‘generally, artists, when they draw, are not really seeing nature as it is. They are projecting on nature their familiarity with other people's art.’11 That is to say, artists represent their own ‘physiological reactions’ toward the art of others, and optical art liberates the sacred experience of art-making and enables the spectator to feel as the creator in the process of art-viewing. Lichtenstein embodies this concept through his copycat paintings of Carl Barks' Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck as well as Chinese landscapes, contriving to express ‘a sort of pseudo-contemplative or mechanical subtlety’12 and he's not interested in paying a salute to Carl Barks and Oriental Zen-like nature but representing them as printed copies. Of course, Lichtenstein also copies himself. In Lichtenstein's series of female nudes, the woman figures are also his sixties copycats re-emerging as their own printed versions in movement. 9 Ibid, 54. Ibid, 64. 11 Camille Morineau, The Exhibition – Roy Lichtenstein, 62. 12 Ibid, 50. 10 9 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE Figure 5 (Left) and Figure 6 (Right) Lichtenstein imperils the artistic convention firstly with his copycat paintings, which are represented as parodic blank-irony, to the point that the stratification between high art and mass culture is mercilessly unsettled. Later on, with that pervasive saturation of Ben-Day dots in his female nudes, Lichtenstein subverts the sense of time and visual spatiality by the distortion of the spectator's perceptual apparatus in a liminal space (in his art) where the copycat women are undressed in their own private apartments claustrophilically enclosed with mirrors. As a result, Lichtenstein consummates his investigation of ‘illusionism, abstraction, serialization, stylization and appropriating’ with his Nudes with Beach Ball in 1993.13 In Nudes with Beach Ball, Lichtenstein ‘echoes’ his Girl with Ball in 1961. ‘The girl with ball’ during the sixties has her clothes taken off by the nineties, re-joining her female companions, innocently playing ball by the beach. The hypothetical deployment of the painting could easily arouse a Sapphic-inspired homoeroticism but the image conveys an odd purity as if those barely clothed females are nothing more than objects by the beach. Ben-Day dots have the sense of identity ‘annihilated’ as well as dissolved within a series of optical-kinetic movements while everything becomes representation-in-process without discriminative exception among objects, geometrical dots and humans. Carlene Meeker once comments: ‘He (Lichtenstein) wanted his work to be viewed as an idea - the idea being [not nude women, but] this style that he developed, based on commercial imagery.’14 Eventually, Nudes with Beach Ball is not about female nudes but an investigated concept of stylization in art. Busby Berkeley and Digital Sublime in the Age of Postmodernity Lichtenstein utters his fascination with the 1930s (when Benjamin wrote his notable essay about art in the age of mechanical reproduction), and he indicates that the ‘conceptual nature’ in the 1930s art: ‘It obeys a peculiar logic based on the compass, the set square and the triangle. People saw themselves as more modern than we do today and their art betrays a naïve, trusting sophistication that appeals to me.’ 15 Such obsession with geometrical shapes during the thirties was exceedingly incarnated in a series of Great Depression musicals choreographed by Busby Berkeley’s collaboration with Warner Bro. studio, starting from Gold Diggers of 1933. Berkeley, like Ziegfeld, has a penchant to overlap female bodies to deliver a manifold image of plenitude. In the case of Berkeley, the cinematic frame dissects female flesh into body parts as the camera zooms in on their legs, facial features and bosoms, separately. After the visual mutilation of the 13 Jack Cowart, Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End, 143. Ibid, 132. 15 Camille Morineau, The Exhibition – Roy Lichtenstein, 28. 14 10 KUO: THE DIGITAL SUBLIME OF FEMININE SPECTACLE females, those fragmented bits and pieces are reassembled together to be built into lifeless objects, such as flowers and water-falls. Figure 7 Laura Mulvey utilizes the example of Berkeley to sustain her well-reputed notion of "woman as image, man as bearer of the look’ in her ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’ Mulvey views the cinematic representation of female bodies as ‘coded for visual and erotic impact’ and they ‘connote to-be-looked-at-ness.’ In Mulvey's opinion, she thinks of such display of female bodies as sexual objectification of women as the female bodies here become the ‘leitmotif of erotic spectacle’ in order to ‘signify male desire.’ In this instance, Mulvery deems male audience as the complicit manipulator of such ‘narrative verisimilitude’ by the visual fetishization of female bodies: The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralize the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. 16 Through the extra-diegetic detachment within the narrative, man is able to shape the egoideal of his identification in process, and woman is placed in the position that signifies castration17. Furthermore, Mulvey considers camera's look voyeuristic since it is ‘disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude’ while ‘an illusion of Renaissance space’ is produced in such conniving manner.18 In other words, Busby Berkeley’s choreography, in Mulvey's viewpoint, turns female bodies into spectacle to be erotically consumed by the male gaze, and man is positioned as the voyeur, secured by the gap between the spectator and the spectacularized object. What Mulvey might neglect, in the case of Busby Berkeley, is the ‘universal equality’ existent in Berkeley’s choreography, which could be an embodiment of optical art in human form. Each segment of female bodies is equivalent with the dots in optical-kinetic movement, especially in moments when those body-units move and sing to deliver an impersonal kinaesthesia in the process of ‘illusionism, abstraction, serialization, stylization and appropriating’ just like Roy Lichtenstein with his female nudes and Ben-Day dots. Still, we 16 Ibid, 810. Ibid, 815. 18 Ibid, 816. 17 11 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE might need to ask ourselves another question. Busby Berkeley’s chosen subjects in his notable choreography seem to be prevalently female and men in this case are often assigned as the singing spectator (Dick Powell), and the uses of male bodies remain under-cultivated while that of female bodies are visually exhausted to delicate details. This question shall be answered in the following passages. Figure 8 Cyril Barrett notes, when the spectator (of optical art) gazes, the visual structure of art-object ‘dissolves in a luminous glow’ and the lines are seamlessly concealed in optical art so that the spectator can only see ‘the continually distorted reflection.’19 Also, optical art demands a severe sense of unifications as ‘the movement of the units is held strictly within the limits of the picture and any addition or extension would upset the rhythm and cause the picture to disintegrate.’20 The sense of integration in optical art carries a unique rhythm of its own, and the quantified representation, on the contrary, doesn't exactly function as the leitmotif of erotic voyeurism but weakens the spectator with a sense of awe: ‘We sometimes speak of devouring something with our eyes. In these paintings (of optical art) the reverse thing happens, the eye is attacked and devoured by the paintings.’21 Figure 9 Busby Berkeley’s cinematic representations of female bodies, particularly in the example of his Footlight Parade, are turned into ‘a product of exploration and calculation’ through his 19 Cyril Barrett, An Introduction to Optical Art, 87-88. Ibid, 110. 21 Ibid, 112. 20 12 KUO: THE DIGITAL SUBLIME OF FEMININE SPECTACLE choreography of flowers and water-falls. Here the audience watches the women line up in carefully devised positions, and they stand side by side, ‘bringing the spectator's optical mechanism into play as in ju-jitsu one's opponent's strength is sued against him.’22 The spectator is devoured, as well as intimidated, by such excess of bodily flesh, and Berkeley’s optical art in human form becomes a counter-movement of voyeurism, instead. The female bodies, intermingled with the flower and water-falls as well as the singing melodies, are dissolved along with the flowing geometrical lines and moving dots. In this case, female bodies no longer function as objects to be “erotically consumed” but more as the problematizer that defies the spectator’s position as the subject. Whether it's Roy Lichtenstein or Busby Berkeley, their art demonstrates a sense of digital sublime in optical kinaesthesia. As for the sense of sublime in the realm of postmodernity, Lyotard elaborates this idea with Kantian disinterest, which ‘carries with it both pleasure and pain.’ Simply said, the sentiment of sublime, by Kant's definition, is a pleasure that ‘derives from pain.’ Lyotard deepens the Kantian disinterest insofar as ‘the faculty to present something’ is forcefully stimulated to conceive the subject in the making of art. The pursuit of ‘authenticity’ as well as ‘aura’ (uniqueness and permanence) shall be realized by solidifying the essence of beauty into the eternal phase as Renaissance artists endeavour to ‘present’ the perennial truth of life through art. In other words, the Renaissance art intends to present the concept of beauty, which prospers by ‘the sentiment of pleasure independent of any interest the work may elicit, appeals to the principle of a universal consensus.’23 (77) Such tendency invites the stabilization and formulization in art-making as the pleasure of beauty relies upon a presentable familiarity. In the cases of Roy Lichtenstein and Busby Berkeley, the images in optical-kinetic movement produce pleasure and pain simultaneously by the formless infinity of those multiply propagated figures within each frame, and in the end, those figures stir the viewer's formulized expectation so much that they could be painful to watch in awe. This awestruck sense of sublime is also an aesthetic to ‘present something through negativity’ as well as ‘empty abstractions’ which human imagination meets its end and fails to perceive. That frustrated attempt to perceive or present by itself causes an unspoken pain. Representing female flesh as the thing itself creates an ‘empty abstraction’ to be blended into a ‘transitory and reproducible’ universe - a liminal space (of dissolution) which disobeys your commonplace comprehension of time and spatiality. Lyotard concludes, the failure with modern art is its reconciled ‘relation between the presentable and the conceivable’24 and that postmodern artists should be philosophers who erase the bridging faculty between the two and guide the spectator into the domain of pleasurable pain (or painful pleasure) as human flesh in the art of Roy Lichtenstein and Busby Berkeley are asexually objectified and quantified to present the unpresentable – a digital sublime in the postmodern age of mechanical reproduction. 22 Ibid, 120. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 77. 24 Ibid, 79-81. 23 13 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE REFERENCES Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. London: Pimlico, 1999. Barrett, Cyril. An Introduction to Optical Art. Great Britain: Studio Vista Limited, 1971. Cowart, Jack. Roy Lichtenstein: Beginning to End. Madrid: Fundacion Juan March, 2007. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Morineau, Camille. The Exhibition – Roy Lichtenstein. Paris: Pompidou, 2013. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2009. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Chia-wen Kuo: PhD Student, Department of English, National Cheng-chi University, Taipei, Taiwan. 14 The International Journal of the Image interrogates the nature of the image and functions of imagemaking. This cross-disciplinary journal brings together researchers, theoreticians, practitioners and teachers from areas of interest including: architecture, art, cognitive science, communications, computer science, cultural studies, design, education, film studies, history, linguistics, management, marketing, media studies, museum studies, philosophy, photography, psychology, religious studies, semiotics, and more. 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