Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (I) is, among other things, a pretty giddying synthesis of the sacred and profane senses of the exclamation ‘Oh My God.’ A focus of pious rapture for the devoted, more lascivious souls have suggested there’s maybe something a little orgasmic about the way the saint is responding to the prospect of a gamine, cloud-borne angel piercing her with a shaft of divine light.
Norman Bryson has used the term ‘mysterious filler’ to describe the sort of spongy and amorphous cloudy bodies – apparently capable of supporting the weight of saints and angels – that Theresa is swooning onto, the sort of cloud forms that are ten-a-penny in all those vertigo-inducing baroque ceiling paintings. Catherine James, in her account of gravity and fantasy, applies the term to the dreamily indistinct foliage in Fragonard’s The Swing (II) – a key moment, for her, in imaging the erotics of weight and weightlessness.
A pastiche of Fragonard’s swing crops up in the video for Ashley Huizenga’s rad electropop come-on ‘Marquise de Sade’ (III) (incidentally, apropos of the fantastic orgies De Sade’s novels stage, Roland Barthes observes that, for Sade’s libertines, sex is about the attainment of a state whereby their bodies seem to ’swim’ (IV)). Huizenga has a bit of an aesthetic thing for gauche cosmetic gravitylessness, from the vertiginous wigs and bust-boosting corsetry of Rococo courtiers to the ozone-eroding coiffures and artificially perkified silicone tits of 1980/-90s glamour girls – silicone, botox and, before them, paraffin wax (which Barbara Jones, in her book on funerary traditions, reveals was used to build up corpses’ sagging faces for funerals) being, of course, the beauty industry’s very own mysterious fillers.
Confirming that gravity isn’t sexy, there’s all those instances of flight and floating being used to stand in for sex – just think of Aladdin and Jasmine’s crescendo-ing magic carpet ride, up amid those (curiously swollen) clouds. In a recent essay on levitation, Aaron Schuster notes that ‘in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, levitation always occurs in place of the sexual act. By virtue of its unreal, miraculous character, levitation is apt to convey the miracle of love, which, according to Tarkovsky, is completely obscured by images of copulating bodies’.
There is, of course, no giving or taking in marriage in heaven. Angels, in other words, don’t have (a) sex; exempt from gravity, they’re also exempt from sexual desire and sexual difference. The same was true(ish) of Barbette (V), the transvestite trapeze artist who, as Andrea Stuart details in her book Showgirls, was the toast of 1920s Paris, and whose act centred on the simultaneous resistance of both G-force and gender. The Otolith group’s hauntological sci-fi movies, meanwhile, suggest the possibility of a world where it’s the shape of people’s otoliths (the gravity-sensitive inner-ear organs (VI) that enable us to balance) rather than that of their genitals which defines them. Maybe they got the idea from Sega’s mid-90s masterpiece NiGHTS, wherein players perform aerial stunts in a series dreamworlds as a matadoresque flying androgyne?
Jean Cocteau described Barbette’s transformation ‘back’ into a man as akin to a reel of film being run backwards – a technique he himself used in order to produce (once) dazzling anti-gravitational SFX. As Bauhaus professor and experimental photographer Moholy-Nagy declared, the camera brought with it the capacity to exceed ‘the narrow limits of our eye’ by, for one thing, suspending gravity by freezing bodies in motion – Eadweard Muybridge’s use of photography to discover whether galloping horses lift all four hooves simultaneously being a celebrated early example.
Alex Massouras’ images of divers hung in mid-air (VII) – distant relations of the agonisingly gravity-bound bodies which, for Gilles Deleuze, are testament to Francis Bacon’s ‘pity for the flesh’ (VIII) – imbue this state of suspension with a weird, quasi-existential poignancy. In most of the pieces the bodies hang above empty blue rectangular outlines. The water in Diver A however, evocative as it is of Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (IX), leaves the viewer (as it were) hanging, waiting – like Theresa, recumbent on those milky billows of stucco in anticipation of the divine spear-tip – for what’s gone up to come on climactically down.
