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June 8/9, 2002
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What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
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Bono the Useful Idiot
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Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
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Weekdend
Edition
June 8/9, 2002
The Adventures
of Mademoiselle M.
or Getting Screwed in Paris
by Gavin Keeney
Paris-based bon vivant and arts dominatrix Catherine
Millet's sex memoir (The Sexual Life of Catherine M.) raised
the collective eyebrows of the art-intelligentsia in Paris,
for various reasons, when it was first published last year.
Now that it has appeared in English, perhaps it is time to
examine in detail Millet's role in the culture wars of the 1980s
as well. Some of these intellectual positions are more telling
than the sexual calisthenics of the book, and, in one notorious
case, they place her more definitively on the slutty side of
things than any of the manifold tales of nonstop debauchery.
It was in 1991, while working on my Master
of Landscape Architecture thesis at Cornell University, that
I first encountered the idea of radical contingency in the form
of the work of Scot's poet-artist-gardenist Ian Hamilton Finlay.
I made my way to Scotland, where Finlay was famously under  self-imposed house arrest at his South
Pentland Hills' redoubt, Little Sparta, after a furious round
of battles with the Scottish Arts Council and the Strathclyde
Regional Council (now disbanded) over the nature of his activities
at Little Sparta. Sitting in front of his peat fire, in March,
I was treated to a short history of Little Sparta, plus the
French Affaire. He asked me to write about the latter, given
that the former was already well-documented.
But first a little history. "They",
the local authorities, said his gallery, a renovated outbuilding
(byre) re-named the Temple to Apollo (the faux Doric facade
carries the inscription "His Music, His Missiles, His Muses")
was a commercial enterprise and, thus, taxable. Finlay maintained
that the garden temple was a sacred, tax-exempt structure,
and Little Sparta en masse was a Republic (i.e., a "Raspberry"
Republic) devoted to restoring the sacred foundations of artistic
inspiration and etcetera. He was, at this time, "excavating"
these foundations through exquisite works on paper (issued through
the Wild Hawthorn Press), gallery installations, and in sculptural
form in the garden groves of Little Sparta.
This all led to the Little Spartan Wars
(the first in 1983), mock battles with the authorities that
climaxed in a raid by the Sheriff and confiscation of "works
of art" in lieu of unpaid taxes. Finlay organized the Saint-Just
Vigilantes, an ad hoc group of supporters (including his good
friend Nicholas Sloan at the Tate) and fought a polemical war
(initially in the pages of the TLS) for almost a decade against
the so-called powers of secularized art. It was during the 1980s
that Finlay's work, formerly based on the strenuous codes of
Concrete Poetry, became "militarized", and mock armaments
turned up in the gardens at Little Sparta. Indeed, Little Sparta
was the new name given to Stonypath, after the first skirmishes,
and structurally denotes a territory set apart from Edinburgh
(a.k.a. "Athens of the North"). The Raspberry Republic
issued stamps, cards, broadsides, and other polemical memorabilia
throughout this protracted battle.
The militarization of Stonypath included
Finlay's very strategic foray into the rhetoric of the French
Revolution. In particular, he appropriated the Jacobin phase
as rhetorical ammunition. And, zut alors!, in 1987, after a
round of memorable gallery installations in France exploring
repressed thematic nuances of the Revolution (part of his masterful
campaign to "de-nazify" neoclassical architecture),
Finlay was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to
design a garden commemorating the Rights of Man for the then-forthcoming
bicentenary celebrations of the French Revolution. This commission,
and the subsequent soul-searching amongst the French intelligentsia
regarding the Jacobin phase of the Revolution, caused much ado
about rhetoric in the left-leaning Paris art world.
Enter Catherine Millet and Art Press,
the journal she edited. Art Press, through Mademoiselle M.,
annoyed that a Scotsman (and a Jacobin to boot!) might actually
build a lasting memorial to the French Revolution at Versailles
(at the former site of the Hotel des Menus Plaisirs where the
Estates General met on August 4, 1789 to declare the Rights
of Man), orchestrated a campaign
of character-assassination in Paris to derail Finlay's prestigious
commission. The key documents in Art Press were brazen, bizarre
distortions of Finlay's Paris 1987 exhibitions "de-nazifying
neoclassicism", and they more or less suggested that Finlay
was nourished by an unhealthy (morbid) fascination with the
iconography of Nazi Germany. This balderdash was spread by
word of mouth as well (a fairly smutty mouth we now find out),
and Finlay's commission was revoked. This, notably, was also
the time of the Klaus Barbie trial. It all came to a head with
a now infamous broadcast on Europe 1 (Emission 8/9) with a panel
of savants "discussing" Finlay's commission. This
panel included Catherine Millet, Catherine Duhamel (Ministry
of Culture, Plastic Arts Legation), Michel Blum (League of the
Rights of Man), and Stephane Paoli (Europe 1 moderator). It
was, tout court, summary execution/ambush by media -- a black
ops/arts operation. The project was canceled post haste. This
is all documented in my "A Revolutionary Arcadia: Reading
Ian Hamilton Finlay's Un jardin revolutionnaire" published
in Word & Image Vol. II, No. 3 (July-September 1995).
Finlay fought back and eventually won
1-franc damages in the French courts. Millet enlisted the assistance
of the so-called League of the Rights of Man (part of the Radio
1 posse), a group one may now wonder further about given Millet's
penchant for gang-banging her way to notoriety. Unfortunately,
and in the tradition of the roman a clef, the protagonists/beneficiaries
of her wide-ranging sexcapades are "masked", in the
manner of the grand orgy in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
The commission was never re-instated
and Finlay was never paid for his work. After this all fell
to pieces, another garden was designed for the historic site
of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a garden which is --
curiously -- some sort of garden-architectural sop to the memory
of Marie-Antoinette.
The French are still very uneasy about
discussing certain parts of the Revolution. As a result, a form
of selective amnesia wipes out those parts of history that are
-- um -- uncomfortable to address, such as, say, Vichy. We all
know now that anyone who stayed in Nazi-occupied France during
World War II was in the Resistance, and the Vichy regime was
populated by scarecrows. Anyway, The Terror was a repressed
cultural memory, then, as now, and Millet played upon the fears
and anxieties of the chattering classes to stoke suspicion regarding
Ian Hamilton Finlay's artistic agenda. The garden proposal,
in itself, was never the issue. It actually was a highly poetic
etude with mnemonic devices engaging Rousseau, neoclassicism,
Michelet, and, without even trying, high dungeon of 1980s art
criticism, intertextuality. Needless to say, the demolition
of Finlay's reputation in France took years to correct while
Catherine M. slithered merrily on her way.
Gavin Keeney
is a landscape architect / critic in New York, New York. He
is the author of On the Nature of Things, a book documenting
the travails of contemporary American landscape architecture.
He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net
OUTTAKES
REVIEW 1--U.S. edition (Grove)--The
Sexual Life of Catherine M--"Written with the unsentimental
precision of a guided missile, Millet's slim book detonates
little explosions of awkwardness and confusion in the reader,
pitting arousal against intellectual contemplation. She writes
about her experiences not only with incandescent prose but also
with analytic detachment, as if she were a documentarian observing
from the front lines of sexuality, fluids, limbs, and garments
flying all around her." (The Village Voice, 05/24/02)
REVIEW 2--British edition (Serpent's
Tail)--The
Double Life--"Her book, The Sexual Life of Catherine
Millet [La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M], published in France
last year, has sold 400,000 copies and is still inciting worldwide
debate. 'This has been one of the happiest times of my life,'
she says. 'Not just because the book is a success, but because
a lot of people understand it.'" (The Guardian Unlimited,
05/19/02)
REVIEW 3 --French edition (Editions du
Seuil)--Body
of Evidence-- "For renowned sociologist Jean Baudrillard,
Millet's book aroused thoughts about the death of modern reality.
'The naivety of Catherine Millet,' he wrote, 'is to think that
one lifts one's skirt to undress, to make oneself naked and
so get access to the naked truth--be it the truth about sex
or about the world. 'But if one lifts one's skirt, it is to
show one's self--not to show oneself naked like the truth (who
can believe that the truth remains the truth when one lifts
its veil?) but to give birth to a kingdom of appearances, that
is to say to seduction--which is exactly the opposite.'"
(The Guardian Unlimited, 06/30/01)
NOTORIETY --Confidente
Publique--"Elle s'y est livree en Espagne, au Portugal,
en Italie, aux Pays-Bas, en Belgique. Pour quelles questions?
'A peu pres toujours les memes. D'abord: pourquoi avez-vous
fait ce livre? Et tres rarement--beaucoup trop rarement--comment
l'avez-vous fait? Et puis la question permanente: comment trouver
le plaisir? La presse a insiste sur les experiences de sexualite
de groupe: l'imagination des gens en a ete frappee, et ils m'interrogent
essentiellement la-dessus. Alors, il me faut rectifier: ce
livre n'est pas une apologie de l'hedonisme et de la realisation
des fantasmes.' "--(Le Monde, 02/20/02)
SELECT IHF
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ian Hamilton Finlay at the Tate St. Ives (2002)
Little
Sparta (Hippeis Gallery)
Poursuites Revolutionnaires (Jouy-en-Josas:
La Fondation Cartier, 1987)--Catalogue for exhibition of the
same name at La Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, September
20-December 13, 1987
Inter Artes et Naturam (Paris: Editions
Paris-Musees, 1987)--Catalogue for exhibition of the same name
at Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, April 30-June 28,
1987
Alec Finlay (ed.), Wood Notes Wild: Essays
on the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Edinburgh: Polygon,
1995)--"Finlay's determination to be in perpetual opposition
to the times inspires his most persistent conceit, the presentation
of his allegiance to tradition as dissident; 'Reverence is the
Dada of the 1980's as irreverence was the Dada of 1918'."
Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A
Visual Primer (London: Reaktion Books, 1985; Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1992)
Graeme Murray (ed.), Concerning Nature,
Poem, The Infinite (Edinburgh: FruitMarket Gallery, n.d.)
Robin Gillanders, Little Sparta: A Portrait
of a Garden (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery,
1998)
Zdenek Felix & Pia Simig (eds.),
Works in Europe 1972-1995 (Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag, 1995)
POST-NEO-SUBLIME
FOOTNOTE
A propos the French penchant for selectively
editing history, consider for a moment the fate of the sublime
landscapes of Ermenonville, where Rousseau spent his last days.
First, however, please note that Versailles or any other piece
of Baroque splendour is maintained to the highest standards
of modern historic conservation.
Ermenonville, reputedly designed with
the assistance of neoclassical painter Hubert Robert, was the
estate of the Marquis de Girardin (1735-1808), one of the "enlightenment
era" nobles whose collective philosophical and political
intrigues anticipated, if not supported, the French Revolution.
(See READINGS
4 for a bibliography of material supporting a comprehensive
recollection of this period.) Jean-Jacques Rousseau died in
1778 and was buried at Ermenonville. His remains were first
interred on the Isle des Peupliers (Isle of the Poplars) in
the middle of an idyllic lake created by damming a stream that
ran through the estate.
Perhaps the reason this bit of landscape-architectural
history has been allowed to decompose has more to do with its
origins than its politics (as if those two things can ever be
dis-entwined). Ermenonville represents the full-flower of the
English-style park in France, a style that supplanted the Baroque
in the 18th century and became the favored means of wearing
one's politics on one's sleeve for the upper nobility. Le Notre's
Versailles, Chantilly, and Vaux-le-Vicomte are of course French
national treasures and represent the authorized French national
style (the politics of the ancien regime notwithstanding).
Ermenonville, on the other hand, was
chopped into pieces in 1874. It has since been sliced up into
various development opportunities. The park has been controlled
by the Touring Club of France, since 1938, and they added a
20-acre caravan park. The chateau proper was until recently
rented to the Hare Krishna sect. South of "Arcadia",
a 150-acre portion of the original park where a series of fabulous
follies slowly rots into the ground, a 40-acre "poplar
plantation" was added. The woods are now state owned. A
zoo has been constructed nearby the rusticated "Mill"
-- one of the working follies to the north of the chateau --
and other portions of the park have been sublet to long-term
tenants for recreational ventures (sports fields, etc). La Launette
(a stream that feeds La Nonette, which feeds Le Notre's glorious
reflecting pools at Chantilly) was polluted by a tinned-food
factory. The Isle des Peupliers, where Rousseau's tomb remains
(whereas his remains were long ago removed to the Pantheon in
Paris) is in the process of being undermined by water rats and
collapsing.
See also, Dumas
to the Pantheon! (Sydney Morning Herald, 06/05/02)
SEE ALSO BLUE
(ABENDLAND)
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