An image of an erotic object is a negation of the object’s essential character or humanity... The model thus becomes a token of nature, an objectified artifice that allows the viewer to handle her mentally and to fantasize about her; the human becomes a mannequin, a doll. Robert Sobieszek 1
‘I paint with my prick’,2 boasted Renoir and, according to myth, he liked to start his day by drawing a nude before breakfast. It is a truism that sexuality and creativity stem from the same source. Less readily acknowledged is the voyeurism that has provoked the myriad female nudes in Western art history. Humbug has prevailed to such an extent that in his book Beauty and Other Forms of Value the aesthetician Professor Alexander could declare: ‘If the nude is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals.’3
Now that the veil of delusion has been lifted by feminist art historians and predatory impulses acknowledged by writers such as Robert Sobieszek, it is all but impossible for a male painter to take on the nude without tackling the accompanying issues of exploitation and objectification.
Marcus Harvey manages to have his cake and eat it. On the one hand his paintings are an orgy of unrestrained sensuality, on the other, an indirect indictment of the illustrious history of the nude. His acceptance of the polymorphous perversity of infancy, in which all tactile impulses are equal - his work equates eating, excreting, art-making and love-making - provokes some basic questions. What, for instance, is the difference between Velasquez caressing, with a fine sable brush, the rosy buttocks of his Rokeby Venus, de Kooning ravaging the contours of his castrating nudes, Harvey’s orgiastic gropings, and the masturbatory consumption of pornographic pictures? All these images stem from and invite sexual responses, the difference being the degree to which this is acknowledged. Pornography is blatant in its reduction of flesh to objecthood; high art is more circumspect. By creating a clash between the two cultures, Harvey equates art with pornography and, according to one’s viewpoint, either damns or exonerates them both.
‘In essence’, writes Georges Bataille, ‘the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation... What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? - a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?’4 It takes Harvey half an hour to clean his hands after a painting session; It’s like being a murderer,’ he says. He speaks of the animalistic and cannibalistic aspects of sex and the loss of boundaries as bodies fuse. For him painting is a similarly orgiastic experience, an abandonment of control. He psyches himself up to complete a painting in one session since, as in sex, the materials must be wet. Freud characterized painting as a sublimation of the infantile desire to smear the walls with excrement. Harvey smears colour onto canvas with his fingers, in an orgiastic wallowing.
The results are gorgeous; because of his deft control, the colours don’t merge into a fecal ooze but remain bright, clear, distinct and fresh. Oranges, yellows, pinks, magenta, blue and white are applied with a spontaneity that energizes the canvas. It is impossible not to relish the sensuous tangle of succulent marks that criss-cross these sumptuous surfaces. Cleaving their way through the juicy paint, like runnels or gouges, are hard black or grey lines. From a distance they meld into crisp line drawings of body parts. Schematized images delineate a crotch, an anus, a pair of tight knickers, suspenders, stocking tops, labia and pubic hair. These are the crotch shots of soft porn magazines and the naughty knickers worn by Reader’s Wives in the DIY porn sent in for publication from the suburbs.
The lines are stamped onto the colour like a template: insensitive, reductive, crass, generic. The harsh simplicity of these cartoon-like cyphers is a graphic equivalent of the reduction of a person to body parts; a debased public language that makes inadequate reference to the private domain of desire. It outlines the shapes with an authoritarian rigidity that reminds one of the repressive lash of a whip or the choking restraint of guilt.
Without the lines the paintings would be formless. They delineate areas within which the splurging can be indulged; Harvey describes it as ‘giving oneself boundaries, within which to dive in in an orgiastic state, like a chocoholic.’ The work stands at the intersection of the public and private, the adult and infantile, the unbounded and the circumscribed, the intuitive and the conceptual. Tension is created by the separation of the two languages - the one premeditated and inert, the other indulgently expressive - into a dialogue of confrontation between high art and pornography and between the Apollonian need for order and the Dionysian propensity for excess.
At Goldsmiths’ in the early 1980s Harvey was taught by Harry Thubron, Bert Irwin and Basil Beattie - painters committed to the expressive possibilities of their medium - but also by Michael Craig-Martin, in whose work objects are defined by sharp black outlines. Harvey has fused these disparate influences - luscious painterly abstraction and rigorous conceptualism. While on one level rude and crude, on another, Harvey’s paintings are as deftly orchestrated as a Roger Hilton abstraction. Rigorous formal constraints contain the outpouring of sexual energy. Square canvases are framed by broad white borders that mimic the format of the Polaroid prints which are their source. The device simultaneously elevates the pictures with its formal elegance, and lowers the tone by referring to suburban smut.
The line drawings energize the whole canvas. There are no slack areas; figure and ground interact in a dialogue of open and closed forms. Balance, tension, nuance, measure and scale are brought into play. Only the subject matter subverts the politesse of the design. A vagina or anus draws the eye inexorably to it as a point of entry, a piercing of the picture plane, a disruption of the homogeneity of the surface. Harvey capitalizes on the fact, pointed out by Kenneth Clark, that ‘one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these (sexual) instincts cannot lie hidden...but are dragged into the foreground, where they risk upsetting the unity of responses from which a work of art derives its independent life.’ 5 Confrontation with such sexually explicit imagery destroys one’s ‘unity of responses’, but without it there would be no tension and the paintings would be merely chic.
Yet the articulation of the paint is as important an issue as the subject-matter. The lines are masked over so that, during the finger painting, they are not visible. The smearing relates to the canvas - to the arena of art-making - rather than to the nude. Harvey’s dialogue is with art history, with the expressive potential of paint and the source of the creative urge, as much as with sexuality itself.
In paintings where a hand print is embedded in the pigment, one has a different awareness of scale. The woman’s body becomes enormous and the hand as small as a child’s groping for its mother’s body. Art-making is equated with infantile sensuality as well as adult sexuality.
Harvey is a pop artist, pillaging the high street for imagery, invigorating his art with an injection of gutter energy. And in the tradition of Warhol or Lichtenstein, he redesigns his sources. Half Way l/p,1993 (p. 146), shows the twin peaks of a pair of knees traversed by the spotted line of a pair of knickers half way down the legs - ‘important knickers, heavy knickers, stretched knickers’, intones Harvey. In My Arse is Yours, 1993 (p. 148), the anus is translated into a neat black asterisk, the vagina into an ovoid form hung with labial curtains.
Once the shock has worn off, Harvey’s nudes will look as elegant as Roy Lichtenstein’s swooning blondes. They will be seen as a strategy for continuing to make beautiful, juicy, erotic paintings at a time when painterly painting is an exhausted genre and the nude, by and large, an unacceptable subject. By being unrepentant as a painter and a sexual predator, Marcus Harvey transforms an untenable position into a revitalizing challenge.
1 Robert Sobieszek in Nude Photographs, ed. Constance Sullivan, New York, 1980, p.171
2 Jean Renoir, Renoir, My Father, Collins, 1962, p.185
3 Professor Alexander quoted by Kenneth Clark, The Nude. Penguin Books, 1985, p.6
4 Georges Bataille quoted by Robert Sobieszek, op. cit.,p.171
5 Kenneth Clark, op. cit., P-6
Published by The Saatchi Gallery, London
Sarah Kent is art critic for Time Out.
