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WHORES
20 April 2006
Baudelaire searched the dark back streets of 19th-Century Paris for harlots whose painted faces, whose company and whose
smiles offered him a glimpse into the abyss, exciting because it was profound. There was more than a commercial transaction
going on between the poet and his flowers of evil -- there was a bargaining between lost souls, a danse macabre beyond the
pale of bourgeois stasis and despair.
[Of the painting by Delacroix above, "Women Of Algiers", Baudelaire wrote, "This little poem of an interior
. . . seems somehow to exhale the the heady scent of a house of ill repute, which quickly enough guides our thoughts toward
the fathomless limbo of sadness." When quoting this in his "Arcades Project", Walter Benjamin chose to emphasize
the word fathomless.]
What would M. Baudelaire have made of the harlots of modern-day Las Vegas, sitting at the elegant casino bars playing video
poker, indistinguishable by sight from the non-working girls passing through those same bars? What would he have made of
the billboards and taxicab ads, in plain view in the bright desert sun, featuring exotic "dancers" from the "gentlemen's
clubs"?
In the commercialized sexual transactions of modern-day Las Vegas, souls do not figure. The terror of damnation is reduced
to a haggling over access to body parts and the means by which a bodily emission is induced. Whatever intercourse results
is undoubtedly difficult to distinguish from congress with a rubber sex doll.
Prostitution in Las Vegas enters the realm of bourgeois commercial trafficking -- honest, innocent, drained of life .
. . not far removed from bodily functions performed in a lavish marble-clad rose-lit bathroom. Today we speak unselfconsciously
of "sex workers" and the "sex industry". In the "Arcades Project", Walter Benjamin remarks
that "Prostitution can lay claim to being considered 'work' the moment work becomes prostitution." Today, it's
not just the proletariat which is alienated from its labor, but the bourgeois, too, even the haute bourgeois -- the moneyed
class that patronizes the "respectable" whores who work the classy casino bars.
There are undoubtedly more desperate sisters of the night working the dark back streets of Vegas' shabbier neighborhoods
who more closely evoke the lost ladies of Baudelaire's world, but the distinction today is more apt to seem one of style and
economic status than of existential depravity. The only time you can readily distinguish a working girl from a female tourist
in a casino bar is when the former opens her mouth to speak and reveals a kind of slow-witted banality of mind. ("Nobody
gets into my pants for less than, like, $500," I once heard one say -- the "like" being an inelegant indication
of her willingness to bargain.) She is simply less educated than her non-commercial sister, with a less developed sense of
irony and play.
We're all in hell now, and we all know it -- there is no more glamor in damnation.
[In the painting above, Picasso goofs on the Delacroix painting at the head of this report, deconstructing it. It's not just
an aesthetic exercise. It seems to me that Picasso is appropriating the bourgeois hatred and fear of the female and using
it to dissect the female into lifeless, if vivid and lurid, component parts. It's possible to see cubism in general as an
attempt to RENDER three-dimensional reality onto a two-dimensional surface. It's also possible to see it as an attempt to
REDUCE three-dimensional reality into two dimensions, to make it superficial. Study the two pictures and come to your own
conclusions about Picasso's aims. Consider the use of body doubles in movie sex scenes, where disassociated, anonymous parts
of the naked female body are made to stand in for the whole woman. Consider the question of whether Delacroix's willingness
to confront FATHOMLESS sadness is not more courageous that Picasso's hysterical attempt to master it, to bring its contents
up to the surface and lay them out on a butcher's table. It may lead you to conclude that one goal of modern artists ought
to be restoring the image of the whole woman to art, whatever the psychic consequences for men.]
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