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.

OMG! A-list Fashion photographer/longstanding and storied sleazebag Terry Richardson is in hot water over allegations he’s behaved less than professionally toward some of his models!! In some industries (industries less appreciative of spiritual beauty and raw talent) heads would roll, but fashion knows better – thank God! – than to be swayed by hysteria and hyperbole… Murdofleur is proud to publish this letter from Fashion Itself to Terry, as intercepted by Emma Hopkinson.

Dear Terry,

I hear you’re in a spot of bother re: some teenage models and your penis? What have you done, you silly thing? Everybody knows that when you invite young girls over to your house and take pictures of them naked before engaging them carnally, to always, always have them sign a contract of absolute confidentiality. It’s on page one of the Sex Pest’s Manual. What a fool you’ve been!

Obviously nobody’s saying that you shouldn’t exert your influence as one of the industry’s most prolific photographers to get emaciated girls to tug on your johnson, just that, when you do, it might be an idea to try it on with the quiet ones, you know? The ones that won’t accost you at parties and send you running from the room.

You did exactly the right thing by complaining to Rie Rasmussen’s agency when she did that – if anything will keep these girls quiet it’s the threat of being blacklisted, dropped by their agents and unable to work.

I really don’t see what all the fuss is about anyway. What’s a little pressure to have sex between a 45-year-old-man with a camera and a half-starved teen from Eastern Europe? It’s par for the course and it’s been going on for years. Like institutional racism and fox hunting.

So Terry, darling, don’t be down. You thought the dirty hand jobs and illicit late-night fuck-a-thons with these girls were beautiful, they thought it was creepy and inappropriate and possibly the grounds for a criminal prosecution. Swings and roundabouts. What they call exploitation we know is just you being quirky. Keep being an individual, Terry. Keep being you.

Love and kisses,

Fashion

X

• I’ll keep it brief, even though he didn’t.

• The tools: ‘ abbreviates at the beginning and . at the end (of something  - (smthg.))

• David Foster Wallace (DFW) is an elongation surrounded by abbreviations. Before the publication of The Broom of the System he was always David Wallace. But then he, too, was abbreviated: he cut himself short. (Remember, Sept. ’08?).

• DFW became indispensable as if by stealth: a writer at once vital to his contemporaries (The Corrections [‘Correx’ / ‘Correct’]  would have been impossible w/out Infinite Jest (IJ)) and to his readers. There is an element of the abbreviated in this stealth, is there not? Do you see?

• Abbreviations stand apart from the body of a text as their own language. The jargon that DFW writes in is the unnoticed language of our world – the musak of literature. Often vowelless, they are unpronounceable like the Russian names one skips over in W&P. Do we pay them enough attention? They are, after all, the things that decide; they are often the action points, the committees, the societies, the organizations and the conferences. They are the inactive language of actions that look like stones littered throughout his book: textual roadblocks taking form and moving all that flows around them.

• They are ambiguity and clueless. Eliot asked: ‘Where is the Life we have lost in living?/Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
/Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ DFW has answered.

• The abbreviation of a name – O, Hal, E.T.A itself – is a renaming and he knew it. Names have a property more than words – they are closer to a purer, spoken language: what Derrida called an ‘original’ language; they are meant, created to be spoken and called. The abbreviation of a name can be affectionate and teasing: here it’s in jest.

• Imagine the length of IJ if he hadn’t abbreviated.

• DFW is now www.hrc.utexas.edu/dfw

Dorothy Feaver

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answers on a postcard please

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more post coming soon

God gets a look in too; Darling Nikki is the track that got Mrs. Al Gore in an unholy flap and led to the introduction of the ‘Tipper sticker’ (Prince, meanwhile, would have God consign him to hell for his lowdown tomcatting ways on the last track of his next LP) while on Diamanda Galas’ hysterical ‘You Must be Certain of the Devil’ it’s impossible to tell  whether Galas is horrified at the approach of the rapture or ecstatic at the rise of Lucifer. She gets almost as emotional as Glen Beck on the 4th of July.

Spotify Playlist

by Francesca Wever-Newth

Sometimes it’s important to be sober. Your best friend’s wedding, for example. Film premiers, especially when they are your own, most definitely fall into this category; be-on-your-best-behaviour-or-expect-social-ruin-!

Here is my OMG story. It took place last Friday.

Jammy Dodger © Alice Feaver

I’m at a friend’s flat, killing time before I have to leave. Four hours till I have to go. I’ve been hungry all day, but I have that irritating issue that often arises when I’m abroad. I’m too broke to eat out and can’t be bothered to cook, especially not fumbling about in someone else’s kitchen. Fumbling in foreign kitchens feels so wrong.

This is Berlin. It is the coldest winter in twenty years, Berlinale fever has hit the city and I’m screening the documentary film I made with a friend. The film is about ‘Mauerpark’ [Wall park], a space I became obsessed with when I lived across the road from it in the summer of 2007. I would spend my Sunday mornings at its quirky flea market and then lie on the grassy slope and unashamedly people-watch. I got so engrossed I wrote a dissertation about the history and politics of the space. But my little corner of Berlin – former border zone and death strip between East and West Berlin – is under threat, as developers plan six-storey town houses on its periphery. We interviewed the architect of the park and the people trying to save it. Pretty serious stuff.

The film premier is tonight and I’m starving. I watch TV with the hope it will drown out the angry growling coming from my stomach. For a couple of minutes I am engrossed with this food dilemma and try to be creative with solutions. Problem: No milk in the fridge. Potential solution: Cereal, double cream and water? Bah. When I hear my phone ringing I am torn away from my banal foodie dreams.

Within the next two hours I discover that the two friends I was relying on to support me me in staying sober tonight, have failed me. One is stuck in Nice in a cheap motel (apparently the French can’t hack the freak snowfall). The other friend has been forced to get back onto the Gatwick Express which failed to get her to the Easyjet counter in time.

My coping strategy for this new dilemma finds expression in my original dilemma – my growing hunger. Again the foreign kitchen guilt gets me, but not enough; I root around the kitchen for any passable snacks. A biscuit would definitely cheer me up right now. I chance upon a biscuit tin and feel like I’ve struck gold when I peer inside. Not only are they homemade but they’re big and round and look like they’d fill that grumbling stomach of mine. Munching my way through homemade foodstuffs makes me feel guilty, probably three or four times more guilty than had they been your average hobnobs. Nevertheless, I gobble a big one down and sneak happily back to the sofa. Lying back I realise I now have two hours to kill – great, just enough time for a DVD. But I realise I’m far sleepier than I realised. So I snooze. Just for a little bit, I think.

I wake up with a bolt forty minutes later, terrified that I’ve slept through the screening, but its OK, the clock says I’m right on time. My heart races, although I feel really drowsy. Stupid, stupid idea to snooze, I should have powered through. I put on some lipstick with the hope I’ll look sprightlier than I feel. In front of the door I get a hunger pang. Damn it, the cookie tin is still within arm’s reach. I peer inside and eye up the biggest one. Compromise, I say to myself as I reach for a smaller one. I’ll buy more tomorrow.

The tube ride passes like I’m in a dream, the stops seem to last forever and I’m lost in unfinished thoughts that merge and overlap with each other. People are looking at me like they can tell what I’m thinking, boring right into my brain. I need some fresh air and to wake up out of this hideous snooze mode. Stupid snooze, I feel hideous.

I miss the turning for the venue twice, and when I eventually find the right road I walk past the door…once, twice. Third time lucky. I sip a beer pathetically. Then I sit outside and hope a cigarette will wake me up from this nonchalant mess. Am I not meant to feel excited, chatty, nervous, even? Why do I not feel okay? I think back to earlier in the day and wonder where it all went wrong. Has someone drugged me? Did I just get roofied? That soup for lunch, it did taste pretty strange, the man did smile at me weirdly. But he was a sweet guy. Or maybe he wasn’t? Dont those men that roofy drinks all appear sweet? My mind is in overdrive. People are arriving, they’re asking me questions, I am trying to understand what they want. I try to look into people’s eyes as they talk to me. Concentrate, I think, concentrate harder.

Somehow, a glimmer of suspicion emerges from somewhere in the back of my head, and I have to call my friend to check… Yes, she says: just one of those cookie – the ones in the special tin, the hash cookies – usually knocks her out for the night.

I spend the rest of the evening in a delirium, wandering about, trying very consciously to focus on people’s eyes as they talk to me. Start film? Sure, yeah, whatever, why not, I introduce the film and half stumble off the stage. Film starts, film finished, people applaud, people compliment, what’s the music? Dunno. Oh God, stay cool. This is gruesome.

I feel like I’m drunk at my best friend’s wedding.

But I really don’t care, I AM SO HUNGRY.

HERE’S THE TRAILER

OK, stay there, January 2010, Ink and gouache on paper, 420 x 195 mm

Does making things shorter and simpler always mean dumbing things down? Is there a middle ground between the ZOMG!-y inanity of twitterspeak and the sort of impeneterable jargonese the artworld holds so dear? These are the questions that keep Sophie Frost awake at night.  Here’s her (bitesize but thought-provoking) response to Murdofleur’s request for some reflections  on artspeak, hype and inclusivity.

1. Have you been to the new Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi photography exhibition at the Whitechapel? Now there’s an exhibition with too few words - there are basically no historical asides or explanations to any of the photos, which renders the unassuming viewer clueless as to the difference between Gandhi, problems facing eunuchs in India and the caste system as they are randomly placed side by side in bizarre categories such as Place, People, Performance. What is the solution to this other than meaningless art blurb?!

2. In his book on communism, Tariq Ali says: “For many educated in the spirit of postmodernism, there is no such thing as a proper narrative, only fragments – all of which are of an equal value. Surely this most recent phase of global capitalism, rampant and turbocharged, that has transformed politics, culture, sexuality and the economy, is a striking example of a strong narrative requiring a robust intellectual response – not wishful thinking illustrated by vignettes from various cultures.”
When is artspeak/critical rhetoric “robust and intellectual” rather than a pointless vignette?

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Thanks to Charles Gouldsbrough for this one.