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Charles de
Brosses thought that fetish is the worship of material objects originated
from the primordial psyche for the individual to derive an inexplicable
comfort or pleasure for such a fixation. Accordingly, that worship is
primitive, proto-religious, uncivilized, and unenlightened. How fetish has
arisen in man’s psyche is an issue that has been thoroughly discussed and
theorized especially in Sigmund Freud’s “General Psychoanalysis”
and in Jacques Lacan’s “The Signification of the Phallus.” Many
authors since then such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva
and Sarah Kofman, have commented on this topic of fetishism. Each looks at
it from the view points dictated by the individual’s own cultural leaning
and beliefs. For example, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva held feminist
views and their reading of fetishism cannot depart from their own aversion
against a phallo-centric, patriarchal construction. Derrida in Glas
(1974) pointed out that the indecision characterized in the fetishist
reflects the instability of signification and hence it is an example
appropriately “showing deconstruction in action.”
Louis Althusser
appropriated the Lacanian theory, claiming that because of the split ego,
an alleged development in the infant’s mirror stage, the fetishist misrecognizes
his socially- constructed persona as his true self. Bataille and Lukacs
relentlessly exposed the commoditization of art, declaring that such an
act is tantamount to a fetishing of culture. Greenberg’s theories in
modern art were vilified as an apotheosis of fetishism in the visual arts
while Walter Benjamin was criticized as having out-fetished the fetishist
in his developing of a materialistic method to approach cultural
artifacts.
Without exception,
all of the above thinkers, including Benjamin and Greenberg, have found
fetish to be an extremely undesirable thing-something that confuses the
split ego to fix on as a kind of comfort-yielding substitute,
psychologically speaking. Hence fetish is not simply a word that connotes
guilt in a Christian, “phallo-centric” culture but also something to be
actively avoided to make way for an enlightened setting for the
re-development of culture in a society.
The Enlightenment
theory of fetishism decries fetish as an idiosyncratic worship that cannot
distinguish between subjective desire and objective causality. In this
light, one may expect Immanuel Kant’s observation to provide a clear
solution to the problem of fetishism. In his essay, Critique of
Judgment (1790), Kant noted that the aesthetic faculty of a
self-critical mind is one that is capable of distinguishing within
sensuous experience between the purposive-ness of its own subjectivity and
the objective purpose found in teleological systems such as biological
organisms. In other words, Kant was saying that because of the debased
quality of fetishism, i.e. one that is not worthy of a critical mind- an
enlightened person must be able to distinguish the aesthetics of the
beautiful from that of the ugly. The aesthetics of the ugly, implied by
Kant, points to fetishism since it is merely about “objective purpose
found in teleological systems such as biological organisms. Such a
primordial overvaluing of materialistic object-hood is thus not conducive
to the consummation of a moral autonomy in an individual. The fact of the
matter is, even if I have slightly erred in that reading of Kant, the
privileging of aesthetic over fetishism by the combined mentality of all
of the above thinkers would still come to my rescue as it inevitably leads
to the conclusion that fetishism is the aesthetics of the ugly.
Unfortunately, it is
almost impossible to apply Kant’s solution to the domain of painting,
partly because none of the aforesaid people are artistic geniuses, but
mainly because an aesthetic for the genuinely beautiful is border-blind.
All borders, be they temporal, geographical, ideological or cultural, have
no relationship with beauty whatsoever. The Yin and Yang are the elements
that reality is made out of, according to Lao Tzu, a sage living in China
3000 years ago. But there is no such thing as a European Yin and Yang. Nor
is there such a thing as Chinese beauty. To recognize the universality of
this implication is the first step towards wisdom.
If anything, a simple
example given by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon will fully illustrate
the inconsistency of Kant’s so-called solution. So let us now turn our
gaze on what the artistic geniuses would have said about fetish.
We may still recall
the uproar created over this work by Picasso in his time. That uproar was
essentially rooted in the very mentality of treating fetishism as an
aesthetic of the ugly.
Figure 1: Picasso,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
In Figure 1, the faces of the Demoiselles, who are in fact women that
Picasso found in a brothel in Avignon, are being depicted in a primitive
style strongly suggestive of the African mask. Even though Dr.Frenchy
Lunning, Ph.D. has pointed out to her friend that in art there is nothing
original under the sun, correctly implying that even with artistic
geniuses like Picasso or our nameless African master shown below (Fig. 2),
the so-called originality in art has never truly existed, it would still
be grossly unfair to say that people like Picasso , Cezanne, or Matisse,
have appropriated African Art, or any other art for that matter. However,
while it is true that Picasso had adopted an African approach in this
painting’s aesthetics rather than one that is reflective of “critical”
beauty peculiar to the Christian culture around the Mediterranean Sea, one
cannot say that the border has been crossed or the sanctity of classical
beauty violated.
Borrowing from
Foucault, may I suggest that in our case at hand, aesthetics itself can be
a social construction! Whatever is exulted in a culture originates from a
power-structured relationship in which the suppression of the other is in
full force. In this case, in our Western culture in which otherness,
African Art, is considered alien. Needless to say, Greek Art was
privileged over African Art prior to the emergence of Picasso. The
Classical has always been upheld as the epitome of reason; the classical
principles of design thus ensued are the legitimate product of “an
enlightened and sensible mind.” African Art was denigrated as ugly,
fetishist, primitive, raw and uncivilized. It is, like Kant has said, a
“mystifying of the physical world by attributing to it a human-oriented
teleology and reified the social world by subjecting all capacity for
moral autonomy to mechanical rituals and dogmatic beliefs.
 Figure
2: Zaire wood carving
Were one to believe Kant, then one would have failed to see the artistic
rationales of Picasso, who,
as an artistic genius,
doubtlessly has a higher stake in art, and therefore a better
understanding in the technical and compositional problems of painting than
Kant, who is simply theorizing about art up to that point. It is fair to
say, then, that Picasso understands better than Kant in both the aesthetic
and the fetish, as the vast and brilliant oeuvre of this master has
attested.
In Figure 2 we see a
chieftain’s wooden stool from Zaire in the form of a female slave. The
prominent breast; the pedantic pose; the elephantine ear; the drooping
inner labia and the impossible anatomy of the feet suggest that this
figure is fetishist by nature. For a culturally thoroughbred European
viewer to admire it, he must first remove the taboo and the curse of an
aesthetic of the ugly as a transitional stage, so the guilt of fetish
worship is eliminated of its psychological baggage.
 
Figure 3:
Ben Lau Erotica Francais
Figure 4: Knox Martin: Woman
Figure 3. shows my
painting of Erotica Francais and Figure 4 is by the contemporary
master, Knox Martin (an artistic genius with an astonishing I.Q. of 196)
These pictures shows the coupling act in which a man and a woman are
engaged in an erotic embrace (Fig. 3) and the painterly manipulation of
the body shape of a woman (Fig. 4) indicates a perfectly powerful and
vivid wildness and primitiveness.
Not only have their limbs the
appearance of having been "truncated" or "anatomically displaced," they
also appear to indicate a fetish suggestive of "kinky
sex" or "formal perversion"- in
other words, formal constitution unacceptable in the classical sense
denoting beauty. The
enjoyment of that fetish naturally fills such a viewer with guilt echoing
back and forth in the deep corridor of his own ego.
In my MFA Graduate
Thesis paper proper, I have attributed all of my works to a design
principle grounded in artistic excellence and timeless beauty with the
intent of calligraphic mark- makings. My aesthetic is, therefore, one that
dismisses the cultural border in art and diminishes the effect of
existential relativity. Hence there is to be neither a European, an
African, nor a Chinese styled beauty in an art that treads on the water of
timelessness. There is only beauty. Neither a temporal nor a cultural
border exists for an art that is beholden only to beauty. Just as we
cannot describe mathematics as hermeneutical or elitist, neither can we
say the same about an art that is based on the supreme mathematical
relationship as a ground-work for the expression of beauty. A careful
visual examination of these arts (from Fig. 1 through Fig. 4) would
probably prepare one for the revelation of that mathematical truth- or
perhaps not. But whatever the outcome, it is self- evident that, not
unlike classical art, these arts are similarly grounded in a precise
geometrical structural matrix. The kinship offered by mathematics ties
them in and rejects the claim that fetish is ugliness incarnate.
I have defined beauty in the same
vein as the supreme mathematical relationship arrived at by a genius, one
that invokes the notion of the sublime. The art thus conceived serves the
dual functions of transcending the spirit as well as provoking the
sensual. The work of Picasso, that of the anonymous Zaire master, Knox
Martin’s work and my own work here all carry that supreme mathematical
relationship. In addition, these works are fully capable of awakening the
sensual. The answer to the question posed by the heading of this paper,
“Does fetish point to an aesthetic of the ugly?” is therefore a flat and
resounding “NO!”
While these artists are not
exactly saying that a good fetish is beauty incarnate itself, the next
logical step for the viewer is to examine art at its root and ask the
question why fetish has been heavily relied on as a device for the
painters to bring out the sensual in their visual metaphors. From the
Egyptians and the Greek, through the Oriental, the Medieval and the
Islamic up to the present, this strategy of fetish adoption has never
changed. Why have the African, the Spanish (Martin is part Spanish and
part Indian), or the Chinese artists reached the implied consensus that
Kant is truly mistaken in treating the fetish as the other in a cultural
context with regard to aesthetics? The rest of the thinkers mentioned
above, by the same token, have similarly erred in making the suggestion
that fetish points to an aesthetic of the ugly. |
