Public (E-Journal, York University)

Contributors 
Jody Berland teaches Cultural Studies in the Depart- Katharine Adrienne Setzer is a Montreal writer and 
ment of Humanities, Atkinson College, York University. videomaker. Her video Trust You (1990) has been 
She has published extensively on music, media and exhibited in queer film and video festivals in Montreal, 
social space and on Canadian perspectives in cultural Chicago, New York and Vancouver. 
theory. Her current work explores cultural and techno- Cheryl Sorkes is an artist whose work has been 
logical mediations of the weather. 
exhibited across Canada and internationally. She has 
Lachlan Brown is researching the 'net' in relation to 
other modes of communication. He is a doctoral can- 
didate at Goldsmiths' College in London and is editor 
of the journal Difference Engine. 
Sean Cub i t t  is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Cul- 
tural Studies at John Moore's University, Liverpool. 
His work has been published widely in such journals 
as Screen, Variant and Third Text. He is the author of 
Timeshift: On Video Culture (Routledge, 1991) and 
Videography: Video Media as Art (Macmillan, 1993). 
Christ ine Davis is a Canadian artist whose work is 
exhibited internationally. She will be in a touring exhi- 
bition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Frankfurter Kun- 
stverein and Haus am Waldsee in Berlin in the fall of 
1994. She is represented by the Olga Korper Gallery in 
Toronto. 
Derek Jarman leaves a legacy of paintings, poetry 
and films. His numerous accomplishments include the 
films Caravaggio (1986), Edward 11 (1991), Wittgensfein 
(1992) and Blue (1993); and the books At Your Own 
Risk (1992) and Chroma (1994). 
Paul  Kelley is currently writing a doctoral disserta- 
tion on Walter Benjamin at the University of Toronto. 
His most recent essays appear in Left History, West 
Coast Lines, Quarry and CineAction! 
Micah Lexier is an artist living in Toronto. He exhibits 
regularly in Canada and is represented by the Jack 
Shainman Gallery, New York. This fall he will be cele- 
brating the 10th anniversary of his relationship with 
his lover Doug. 
Susan Lord teaches film at York University where she 
is also a doctoral student in Social and Political 
Thought. Her essays on cinema have appeared in 
CineAction! 
recently shown at Galerie Triangle in Rouen, France, 
and is currently preparing for an exhibition at Gallery 
101 in Ottawa. 
Vincent Tangredi is an artist who lives and works in 
Toronto. His work has been shown widely in North 
America and Europe. A survey of his work will be 
exhibited at the A r t  Gallery of York University in the 
fail of 1995. The exhibition will be accompanied by an 
extensive catalogue. 
Chantal Thomas is Director of Research at the NCSR 
(National Centre of Scientific Research) in Paris. Her 
books include Sade, I'oeil de /a lettre (Payot, 1978); 
Casanova, un voyage libertin (Denoel, 1985); Don Juan 179 
ou Pavlov, Essai sur la communication publicitaire, a col- 
laboration with Claude Bonnage (Seuil, 1987); Thomas 
Bernahard (Seuil, 1990) and Sade (Seuil, 1994). 
Al len S. Weiss has published several books on art 
and culture including Shattered Forms: Art Brut, Phan- 
tasms, Modernism (SUNY Press, 1992) and Mirroirs de 
I'infini: Le jardin a la franfaise et la metaphysique au 
XVlIe sRcle (Les Editions du Seuil, 1992). The writings 
published here are part of his forthcoming Aphoristic 
Theater. 
Cornel West has been Professor of Religion and 
Director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton Uni- 
versity since 1988, and was recently appointed Profes- 
sor of Afro-American studies and the Philosophy of 
Religion at Harvard University. He is the author of 
many books, including Keeping Faith, Prophetic Frag- 
ments and, most recently, Race Matters. 
John  Yau is a writer living in New York. He has writ- 
ten several books including Edificio Sayonara (1992); 
Rad~ant Silhouette: New & Selected Work 1924-1988; Big 
City Primer: Reading New York at the End of the Twen- 
tieth Century, a collaboration with Bill Barrette (1991). 
Sco t t  McLeod is a filmmaker, photographer and com- 
poser based in Toronto. His works have been exhibited 
and performed across Canada and in New York. He is 
currently completing a hybrid film entitled 26 Rules. 


English

Contributors

Weiss, Allen S.

Picasso's Corrida 
Allen S. Weiss 
For us Spaniards, it's Muss in the morning, the corridu in the afternoon, and the whorehouse in 
the evening. Where do they all converge? In sadness. 
- Picusso t o  Malraux, La t@te d'obsidienne 
Nietzsche insists that "In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the greatest exalta- 
tion of all his symbolic faculties. The essence of nature is to be symbolically expressed: we 
need a new world of symbols, where the entire symbolism of the body is called into play." 
Here, the heart of nature bursts forth from that bliss born of pain, in a sordid sacrifice of 
sublime proportion - for humanity always betrays its gods, often to the point of slaughter. 
The bull has always been a mask of god. The people of ancient Corinth celebrated the 
apparition of Dionysus in his full duality by presenting, in the agora, two absolutely iden- 
tical statues of gilded wood decorated with vermilion, distinguished only by their names: 
Dionysus Baccheios and Dionysus Katharsios, the former bringing misunderstanding, drunk- 
enness, madness, and murder, the latter offering benevolent catharsis. To neglect the expi- 
atory effects of the latter is to portend the worst. 
Picasso could not forget the tale related by Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon, of a bull 
in Valencia which had killed sixteen men and wounded countless others in amateur events. 
One of those killed was a young gypsy, whose brother and sister followed the bull from 
town to town in the hope of assassinating it in revenge, but they never had the chance. 
Finally, the owner of the bull decided to have it slaughtered, both because of its age and 
because of the attempt to suppress such amateur events. The two gypsies were at the 
slaughter-house and the young man asked permission, since the bull had killed his brother, 
to kill the bull. This was granted and he started by digging out both the bull's eyes while 
the bull was in his cage, and spitting carefully into the sockets, then after killing him by 
severing the spinal marrow between the neck vertebrae with a dagger, he experienced some 
difficulty in this, he asked permission to cut off the bull's testicles, which being granted, he 
and his sister built a small fire at the edge of the dusty street outside the slaughter-house 
and roasted the two glands on sticks and when they were done, ate them. They then turned 
their backs on the slaughter-house and went away along the road and out of town. 
The arena, for Picasso, is a desert under the blinding sun, where every gesture is con- 
centrated into an eternal symbol; a labyrinth, where the incalculable, intersecting lines of 
the bull's fatal trajectories establish an ephemeral spiritual deformation; a bed, where pas- 
sionate embraces, in eternal repetition, perpetually redesign the book of the libido, as the 
erotic dance of the torero and bull culminates in a terrifying, exhilarating inversion of 
roles; a canvas, where the palimpsest of sun and shade, blood and sand, steel and flesh, 
orders an endless zenith of passion. It was thus that Picasso loved the corrida, with its 
intrinsic beauty and its intimation of immortality in the face of death. He  loved the cor- 
rida just as he did his paintings, for both arena and canvas are sites of assignation and per- 
fection, risk and destiny. 
And they are also places of light! Andalusian light, Basque light, Madrilenian light, 
Catalonian light, Provenlal light! For the bull never dies at night. As Picasso's friend 
Michel Leiris loved to explain, the corrida is a place "where all is essentially founded upon 
perversity: seduction of the bull by the shimmer of the cloth, temptation of the matador 
who edges closer to the fall - a sort of ripening of evil in a pointed and artful web, under 
a great sun of luciferean beauty." The sun of the corrida exists at the midpoint between 
noon and midnight, advancing in its equivocal moment, as if its light itself marked eter- 
nity. Such is the sun which so horrifyingly illuminated the death of the matador Granero, 
unforgettable to all, killed in the year 1922, his eyes horrifyingly gouged out as his skull 
was crushed, as described by Bataille in Histoire de I'oeil: "It all took place under the torrid 
sky of Spain, not hard and coloured as one may imagine, but solar and with a bursting, 
soft and troubling luminosity which often seems unreal, so much does the burst of the 
light and the intensity of the heat evoke the freedom of the senses, quite precisely the soft 
dampness of the flesh." The world shimmering in the heat, doubled by the trembling of 
bodies - torero and spectator, male and female alike - serves as background for the 
moment of truth, melting all the passions of the soul. 
I t  is the sun that verifies the various sublime, mathematical and corporeal relations 
that obtain in the corrida between the matador, ephemeral incarnation of the sun, white 
light decomposed into the brilliant colours of the rainbow by the prism of the sequined 
costume, and the bull, eternal and inexorable shade. In the corrida, man and monster are 
bound by the extreme limits of ritual gesture, intensified and exacerbated to the breaking 
point of chaos. In the corrida, intoxicating swiftness is transformed into slow dance, as if 
time itself could be conquered by the reduction of speed and the displacement of mass.. . . 
Yet there is one blind spot in this panoptical geometry of death: once enwrapped in the 
muleta - at that point of crimson mortality where the already spilt blood of the bull can 
but enhance the colour of the cloth, and where the hidden recesses of the matador's mor- 
tal flesh are revealed by the virtual penetration of the horn - we don't know whether the 
bull, more opaque than the Spanish night, blacker than Manet's black, more impenetra- 
ble then the devil's excrement, closes its eyes. Indeed, thought Picasso,. . . the inner mecha- 
nism at the most profound centre of my body prepured itselffor all the most disagreeable surprises 
capable of making you die of laughter in the greatest happiness for in the eye of the bull everything 
is explained by numbers and nothing is c h r  at the bottom of the bullish lake and only the odour 
sung by the wound can mathematically describe the serpentine road traversed by the sword. At the 
moment of truth, there exists a nameless, perverse, violent god born under a rotten sun, 
a god whose abode is that ever mobile, fleeting point where horn grazes muleta, sword 
pierces flesh, or, in the demonic reversal of the myth, the deadly tangent where the 
nocturnal horn rips through the solar protection of the matador to enter his hastily and 
inadequately blessed flesh. 
It  was precisely this god that Picasso sought, precisely this god with whom he identified, 
precisely this god, deus absconditzls, perpetually hidden behind cape and muleta, who never 
deigned to appear in the arena. Picasso sought a solution, as his hand traced so many 
veronicas and naturelles on the engraving block, as the silent, inner muscular postures of 
his body assumed the tension of the torero offering his veil, the banderillero in flight with 
his beribboned spears, and especially the picador, who, one with his mount, meets the 
bull force against force, shedding first blood. Contrary to the rite of the corrida, it is the 
bull, solitary prince of darkness, who would triumph in his paintings, the great bulls such 
as Primoroso, Camisero, Destenido, Compuesto, Regatillo, who are his heroes. These were 
the gods he sought in their archetypal form and all their tragic force, in works such as 
La d4ouille de Minotaure en costume d'urlequin, Minotazlre violant zlne femme. From the peren- 
nial confrontation of bison and horse at Lascaux to the most studied gestures of Juan 
Belmonte, the torero who transformed the modern corrida, no exorcism was ever possible, 


no denouement definitive - the corrida remains a monument to the terribilit2 of the irra- 
tional fugacity of life, to the struggle between light and darkness, to the appendage of 
death that lurks behind all eroticism, to the power and mystery of all gestures desirous of 
transforming time into eternity. The corrida was the double of Picasso's art. 
Picasso hated for a Sunday to go by without having attended a corrida, yet, regardless 
of the brilliance of an event, something always escaped him. In March 1935, Picasso 
began to engrave his Minotauromachie, where everything was impossible, where everything 
was essential, where everything had to be condensed into a single eternal moment. He 
wanted to give this work the fragility of a dream, where the pure flame of a candle would 
not be a metaphoric double of the sun, but rather, paradoxically, the very condensation of 
everything earthly, everything of the flesh. He wanted to achieve the same tone proffered 
by Theodore de Banville's anecdote, in his Contes bozlrgeois, of the poet Camoens: while 
writing one night, his candle was extinguished by a sudden gust of wind, yet he managed 
to complete his poem by the glow emanating from the eyes of his cat! Little did it matter 
that certain elements were missing, that certain features were transformed - all the better! 
The terrible sun of the corrida would be transmuted into a point of flame, almost cold; 
the incredibly false lightness of time in the corrida would take on an oneiric heaviness; 
antithetical figures, man and bull, horse and woman, would merge in the conflicting 
images of Picasso and Marie-ThCri.se themselves. Picasso would, finally, become all the 
active figures: he was the music which announced the event; he was the pzlntilla which 
penetrated the neck of the bull who refused to die; he was the mule who dragged the 
ignoble carcass from the arena; he was the storm itself on the horizon! 
True love transforms the lover into an object, a sign, a symbol. In the erotic geometry of 
the passions, the bed is an arena upon which every contact, every pressure, every position 
traces a szlerte of the passions, creating a secret pornographic tableau. Here, all trembles as 
candlelight flickering in an immanent wind. As Goethe wrote in The Divan: 
A strange feeling seizes you 
As the silent torch glows 
No longer you remain 
In gloomy shadows enclosed 
And a new desire leads you on 
Towards a greater nuptial rite. 
And beyond, and again? Like that Proven~al matador Pouly who, during his 
somnambulisitic crises, would, with his sword, pierce through the gaping emptiness of 
his bedroom window to wound the infinite shadow of the night, the Minotaur advances, 
slowly, like the blind, like the impassioned, like the possessed, transforming the entire 
destiny of the corrida. 
The bloodied libertinage of the muleta disappeared. That night, Picasso dreamt of the 
combat between a unicorn and a bull. 


Picasso's Corrida

Lord, Susan

Love Machines: Prostitue/Hysteric/Automaton

Jarman, Derek

Salt lips touching 
In submarine gardens 
Cool marble fingers 
Touch an antique smile 
Shell sounds 
Whisper 
Deep love drifting on the tide forever 
The smell of him 
Dead good looking 
In beauty's summer 
His blue jeans 
Around his ankles 
Bliss in my ghostly eye 
Kiss me 
On the lips 
On the eyes 
Our name will be forgotten 
In time 
No one will remember our work 
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud 
And be scattered like 
Mist that is chased by the 
Rays of the sun 
For our time is the passing of a shadow 
And our lives will run like 
Sparks through the stubble 
I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave. 


Blue

Esch, Deborah

Alice James and the Right to Death

Yau, John

The Language of Love

Frenkel, Vera

from the Transit Bar 
Vera Frenkel 
from the Transit Bar, was a site-specific, six-channel videodisc work made by Frenkel for Documenta 
IX (1992) in Kassel, Germany. I t  featured a functional piano bar with video monitors situated on the 
bar itself, on the piano, and in the walls of the room. Some of the monitors had Polish voice-overs 
while the others featured Yiddish voices. Together, the various voices wove different accounts of the 
experience of moving from one country and culture to  another. These video stories converged with the 
live and transient stories that Frenkel herself heard while she served behind the bar. The following 
account of from the Transit Bar was compiled by Public from a number of current sources, including 
an interview by Dot Tuer in Vera Frenkel: Raincoats, Suitcases, Palms, and the artist's book The  
Bar Report, both published by the Art Gallery of York University, 1993. 
When I was first invited to  make a work for Documenta / X ,  a number of memories and con- 
cerns emerged. I was shown three or four possible sites in the Museum Fridericianum, 
all of them wonderful, but they also seemed too dramatic, too sacred. I was looking for a 
simpler, more vernacular space, and then when I walked into the empty corner gallery I 
thought that what i t  needed was a bar. Standing there, I had this sudden longing to hear 
the voices of my grandparents. I had never known them, but I had been told that both 
sets of grandparents spoke a number of middle and eastern European languages, includ- 
ing Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, and German. So, my visit to determine where my 
work would be installed prompted a longing to hear in that space in one of Germany's old- 
est museums the languages that, had things been different, I might have spoken. 
This intuitive realization that what the space needed was a bar became the confirming 
moment around which the work began. I wanted to make a place where everyday rights 
could be acknowledged and enjoyed and in the form of a work that addressed recent Euro- 
pean/North American migration history. I discovered while making the work that it related 
to  current events in Germany rather more immediately than I might have liked, Just as I 
was completing the installation, the firebombing of the refugee centres began, and the 
responses of many of the people who visited the bar suggested that my concerns about 
language, race, diaspora, alienation, and loss or change of identity were shared and 
had deep resonances in Europe today. 
After Rostock (the immigrant hostel that was firebombed by two young neo-Nazis) I 

called Harald KOhn, director of Rat und Hilfe i m  Asyl (Advice 
and Help in Asylum), where I had hoped that the Transit Bar 
proceeds might go. I asked him whether it would endanger 
the residents of the hostel if I were to mention it in the on- 
air interview I was about to do with a local television station. 
"You must say everything openly, whoever asks," he said. 
"We are anxious, of course. We  live with anxiety. We know 
the risk we take and we do it willingly. If you do not have the 
right to  speak about us in public, then they have already won!" 
One of the premises of the project was that bars allow for 
the kind of candid disclosures that are often only possible 
when you believe that you will never see the other person 
again, that the stranger in whom you are confiding will remain 
a stranger. In from the Transit Bar, the interwoven disclosures 
that appear on the monitors provide an arena for these kinds 
of candid dialogues between strangers who are only "passing 
through." A s  Cornelia Lumsden, the Canadian novelist, has 
suggested, these forms of alienation constitute a genuine folk- 
culture, perhaps the only one we have. 
The experience of the bar was a layered one. If you 
remained in the bar long enough, this "folk-culture" might 
"reveal" itself to you, and the bar itself become what one 
observer described as "an oasis that isn't: a problematized 
oasis." Midway through your drink, looking at the monitors 
and listening to the mix of live and recorded voices in the 
room, you might become aware that only people who spoke 
either Polish or Yiddish could understand all the video sto- 
ries. These were the languages that carried the full narrative 
sequence of the work. There are other languages that would 
have been just as appropriate, but I chose Polish and Yiddish 
because they were connected to my own personal history. 
The subtitles were in English, French, and German, but they 
alternated from speaker to  speaker. 
While I was in Kassel I worked behind the bar every.day 
and heard many stories. One day a woman who had been in 
the bar a few times previously for a late afternoon drink put her 
passport on the counter while I finished pouring her a vodka. 
She showed me the stamp, Statenlos (stateless), that was 
imprinted across her photograph. "After the war," she said, in 
heavily accented German, "I went back and began to look." 
"Other people had lived in the house but over the big pipes 
in the basement I found a box of documents, and a suitcase 
full of bedding. The woman living there was nice enough at 
first, but then she got impatient. 'What will you do with all 
these things? They are only papers,' she said. 'Where will you 
put them all?' Love letters from my father to  my mother. A n  
affidavit about an attempted rape of his sister. Children's draw- 
ings. And in the suitcase, between blankets, the photographs 
and the old passports. 'They are only papers,' she said again. 
'I can get rid of them for you. It won't cost you much.' And 
again, 'Where will you put them all? 'In my heart,' I said. The 
woman laughed. 'But your heart can't be so big,' she said. 
'Look again,' I told her." 
"And where are the papers now?," Peter, who also worked 
at the bar with me, asked her. "In my heart," she said. 
Recently I attended a symposium in Toronto sponsored 
by the Goethe-lnstitut and the A r t  Gallery of Ontario. I t  
was called "Identity in a Foreign Place," and amongst other 
things it addressed different experiences of being a foreigner 
in Canada, in a country which is constitutively heterogeneous 
and where everyone is an immigrant or the descendant of 
an immigrant. After one of the f irst sessions, I met a German 
couple who expressed some disappointment: "We thought 
Canada had solved these problems. In  Germany we think 
of Canada as an ideal place from the point of view of race 
relations." I t  was a strange moment for  me. I explained t o  
them that legislated rights are one thing, and the reality of 
the street, "out there," quite another. from the Transit Bar 
addressed, in part, the incommensurability of these two 
poles of identity. 



Not a member yet

Contributors

Picasso's Corrida

Love Machines: Prostitue/Hysteric/Automaton

Blue

Alice James and the Right to Death

The Language of Love

from the Transit Bar

Blue Skies From Now On: Weather Motifs in Popular Song

Constituting Modernity: The Epic Horizons of Constitutional Narratives

Sovereign Identities and the Politics of Forgetting

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