Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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‘That Melancholy Fiend’: Charles Ludlam’s Bluebeard and the Horrific City
Get PDFThroughout his twenty-nine plays over two decades, North American auteur Charles Ludlam straddled the contradictions of US entertainment through work that was wild, eccentric, brilliant, and queer. And yet, despite having secured a legacy not only as a downtown New York City innovator, but also a singular theatrical voice, Ludlam has been largely positioned by scholars almost entirely through the queer lens, with a primary focus on his use of camp. This paper aims to consider Ludlam’s legacy differently, through a focus on one of his most important works, Bluebeard, and its use of horror tropes as a means to engage its city’s decadent decline on the cusp of the 1970s fiscal crisis that almost brought the city to bankruptcy. By examining that play’s use of affective body horror as decadent embrace of the erotic, the violent, and the hilarious all at once, I argue that Ludlam’s play might have functioned not merely as camp for his queer community, but also as a reflection of the declining NYC for his more mainstream audiences. Ludlam’s use of grotesque monstrosity, I argue, allowed his audience to both recognize and valorize their city’s decline with an ambivalent, decadent pride. Through an analysis both of the show as it exists in published form and of the contemporary reviews, this article aims to consider new levels of Ludlam’s multiplicitous appeal, and also to suggest how provocative, decadent theatre can so poignantly engage and challenge a cultural zeitgeist
Survival of the sickest: On decadence, disease and the performing body
Get PDFThis article looks at how performances and performers embody multiple connotations of decadence and sickness. It addresses the discursive production of these connotations, how they work upon and flow between bodies (gendered, queer and ill), and how performers are seen, or choose, to embody metaphors of sickness and decadence in performance. It focuses on the collaborative work of Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose in the 1990s, and Rose’s collaborations with the British live artist Martin O’Brien in the 2010s, paying particular attention to their staging of queer and sadomasochistic desire as a basis for exploring Flanagan and O’Brien’s experiences of living with (and in Flanagan’s case dying from) cystic fibrosis. While informed by studies of illness metaphors by the philosopher Susan Sontag, and the literature scholar Barbara Spackman, I argue that an examination of political and cultural discourse over the course of the North American culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s – especially in response to a controversy surrounding the work of performance artist Ron Athey – offers a more instructive context for understanding the conceptual proximity of decadence and sickness, and for studying the ‘sickness’ of performers and performances that right-wing critics claimed were contributing factors to societal and moral ‘decadence’. Moreover, Rose’s collaboration with Flanagan and O’Brien, itself the basis of a queerly decadent genealogy, continues to form a basis for reclaiming alienating and demeaning illness metaphors, going much further than Spackman’s analysis permits in recalibrating how a sick body relates to desires that escape majoritarian preferences. The article concludes with an invitation to recognize how metaphors of sickness elide with reductive notions of health and propriety, and to consider what it might mean to live by metaphors on terms that elude their punitive frames.
Acknowledgement: Research for this article has been generously supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Baudelaire’s Celestial Vision of Jeanne Duval
Get PDFMy first experience of Charles Baudelaire’s work resulted from reading Angela Carter’s short story, ‘Black Venus’ (1985), which is interspersed with allusions to his poetry, including an excerpt from ‘Sed non satiata’.[i] The title refers to the so-called ‘Black Venus’ cycle of poems inspired by Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s Haitian partner. In ‘Black Venus’, Carter reconfigures Duval and Baudelaire’s relationship from Duval’s perspective, and presents us with a woman who is in turn vivacious, jaded, provocative, shrewd, and who lights cigarettes with Baudelaire’s discarded sonnets. Carter’s daring depiction inspired me to seek out the source-material – Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857), translated by James McGowan for Oxford University Press (1998). On reading ‘Exotic Perfume’, ‘A Phantom’, and ‘The Cat’, I became fascinated by Baudelaire’s extraordinary linguistic dexterity, and how tantalizing glimpses of Duval were scattered like jewels throughout each poem. Even two hundred years after Baudelaire’s birth, his desire for Duval lingers on to trouble and entice the reader. As the title ‘Sed non satiata’ suggests, satisfaction remains ever-thwarted, engulfing the subject of the poet’s desire and the poetic self: ‘Like a cook with ghoulish appetite |I boil and devour my own heart’, the speaker mourns in ‘A Phantom’, while his incorporeal lover glows with incandescence, a ‘splendid ghost’.[ii]
[i] Angela Carter, ‘Black Venus’, in Burning your Boats: Collected Short Stories (London: Vintage, 1996), pp. 231-44.
[ii] Charles Baudelaire, ‘A Phantom’, in The Flowers of Evil, trans. by James McGowan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 76-81 (p. 77)
Review: Marie Kawthar Daouda, L’Anti-Salomé: Représentations de la féminité bienveillante au temps de la Décadence (1850-1910) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020)
Get PDFSalome is undoubtedly the most prominent femme fatale of the fin de siècle. In his 1967 study of Salome, Michel Décaudin even calls her a ‘fin de siècle myth’.[i] From Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetic fragment ‘Hérodiade’ and Gustave Flaubert’s tale Herodias (1877) to Jules Laforgue’s and Oscar Wilde’s versions of Salomé (1887; 1892), many writers used the young Jewish princess as a literary trope; she became, so to speak, ‘inevitable’.[ii] Indeed, Salome was the subject of poems, plays, stories, novels, operas, even posters and decorative objects, as well as paintings (J.-K. Huysmans famously dedicated many pages of À rebours (1884) to Gustave Moreau’s symbolist representations of Salome, which prompted Bram Dijkstra to write that Moreau’s Salomé (1876) ‘inaugurated the late nineteenth century’s feverish exploration of every possible visual detail expressive of this young lady’s hunger for St. John the Baptist’s head’).[iii] Salome was in fact so omnipresent in the literary field that in 1912 Maurice Krafft claimed to have recorded 2,789 French poets who had written about the dancer, before she slowly faded out of fashion later in the century.[iv]
[i] Michel Décaudin, ‘Un Mythe “fin de siècle”: Salomé’, Comparative Literature Studies, 4.1/2 (1967), 109-17 (p. 109).
[ii] Pierre Jaudon refers to ‘l’inévitable Salomé’ in L’Étouffement (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Plume, 1902), p. 86.
[iii] Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 384.
[iv] Quoted in Décaudin, ‘Un Mythe “fin de siècle”: Salomé’, p. 109
Dress, Identity, and Negotiation by British Prisoners of War in France, 1803-1812
Get PDFBritish prisoners of war captured during the Napoleonic Wars were preoccupied with dress. This is unsurprising given clothing’s relationship to physical and mental health and to identity. However, the discussion of clothing by prisoners during this period goes beyond the passive engagement with these concepts to a conscious manipulation of how dress could be used, and how it could be ‘read’ by others. This paper argues that British prisoners of war used their knowledge of dress, and the skills learned during their incarceration, and from their professions, to turn clothing into escape technologies, and a means to assert agency
Wounds & Weapons in the Napoleonic War: a database of the Peninsular War
Get PDFThe research supporting the authors’ book Officiers de Napoléon tués ou blesses pendant la Guerre d’Espagne (1808-1814) has uncovered a database of over 4,000 entries where the wounds, and the weapons that produced them, are described in some detail. This information can be cross-referenced with any of the other data in the book. The note includes tables relating the location of the wound, the different weapons causing the wound and the breakdown by arm (infantry, artillery, cavalry). The authors are ready to provide a suitable version of the databaseto researchers working in the field
Michael Robinson, Shell-shocked British Army Veterans in Ireland, 1918–39: A Difficult Homecoming
Get PDFFrench Torpedo Development before 1914
Get PDFFrance embraced the promise of self-propelled torpedoes in the early decades of development. Proponents of the Jeune École put it at the centre of naval strategy, tactics, and fleet composition, as a way for a weaker navy to challenge a stronger. Even as the French Navy fell under the influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan and constructed a big gun battlefleet, the advanced torpedo still maintained its prominence. A contemporary publication distributed within the French Navy provides technical details, capabilities, and quality of design for standard French model types before the First World War
Therapeutic Self-Portraiture: finding a sense of self during the Pandemic
Get PDFWith the beginning of the pandemic regular mode of living and doing things have significantly shifted from familiar to unrecognisable. For months we have been unlearning to trust the touch of our loved ones, and even our own skin. News flooded in often confusing us with contradicting information and overwhelming data. The infection curve had become an inverse graph of our mood – when it went up our mood collapsed, when it started to decline – we gained hope. Symptoms were appearing and disappearing making it difficult to listen to our own body – is it a bit of a sore throat or something worse? Adaptation in a world under constant change has never been an easy task, however, trying to function under the permanent threat of contamination has rendered that challenge wearing.
 
Mandated Measures: seismic shifts in the discipline and training of art therapy
Get PDFConfronted by catastrophic circumstances, such as the complexities instigated by COVID-19 and the global pandemic, art therapists naturally interpreted this as an opportunity to effectively evidence their resiliency, innovation, compassion and, indeed, their creativity. This article prioritises the practice and training of art therapy, and explores how the unprecedented circumstances we currently find ourselves in have needed the discipline to evolve in ways that ensures the continuation of the overall integrity, best practices, ethics, and expected standards. This discourse champions the art in art therapy by highlighting creativity as a core tenet of this resilient discipline.
Keywords:
COVID-19, arts-based response, art therapy, art therapy training, Singapore