Art Writing versus Speaking About Art - Art Topic

ART TOPIC is is an exploration of a topic through visual arts or vice-versa. Hosted by Joana P. R. Neves, this episode is an experiment in opposing writing to oral communication. It also engages with queer lives at the height of modernism, the notion of genius and its patriarchal tendencies, as well as the intriguing, unique couple of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

Discover Joana's text "G is for Genius, Grammar and Girl", published on her Substack Art Thinkosaurus. She reads it here as a performance of sorts, with mistakes, reflexions and all, to test voice versus word. What will she discover?

Explore Joana's Substack and become a member for the price of a latte: https://joanaprneves.substack.com/

What you get from this episode:

• How do we write about art?
• Is talking about art different than writing about it?
• Is Modernism entangled in Gender issues?
• How did gender influence modernism and vice-versa?
• Why were we obsessed with the "genius"?
• Musings about Otto Weininger, Rachel Cusk and Ernest Hemingway

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Oh, hi. What are you doing here? Okay. Well, since you're here, then I'm gonna share something that I was thinking of doing, which is a sort of a performance. Exhibition This is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevis. Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life. I haven't prepared anything for today. I wanted to simply get to introduce my Substack. I mention it quite a few times, and it is a place that some people know, some people don't. It's an app and it's a website, it's a newsletter service, and it has been created for writers. So I share my writing in there, I really like it. And I have been thinking about some comments that I've been reading on Substack about the fact that people aren't reading anymore because there are so many podcasts. And of course I thought, hmm, interesting. So that means that I am a weird kind of traitor to both ways of expressing oneself, which is orally through podcasts and in writing. I don't have that perception, but I'm only one person, obviously. And so I wanted to try to read a text for two reasons. So to test that theory, which is that podcasts, of course, there's a critique behind this complaint, which is that podcasts aren't providing information in the same way that texts are, which seems obvious to me. But does it mean that it's irrelevant information, or does it mean that now in a global world where we have to know about Persia, we have to know about Bangladesh, we have to know about the constitution of the United States. Isn't it useful to have quick, snappy informations? And not all podcasts are very quick, actually. There's a lot of podcasts out there that last for two, three hours. But isn't it good to be able to have some information for when, you know, like I did last time for the last episode I recorded, you meet someone from Bangladesh, for example. At least you know something, you don't come empty-handed to the conversation. Um, but you don't have to know the whole history of Bangladesh because you have people you can have a conversation with. And we are not all scholars, so we don't all need to know things in a way that is more detailed and perhaps a bit more um abysmal in some ways, but not with the bad connotation. So, in in a way that is a bit more in-depth, let's say, we don't always need to know everything we're curious about in an in-depth kind of way. So having said that, I was thinking, why don't I read one of my texts? So that was my second reason, to introduce the idea of Substack to people, because it's true that I've been talking about it. I've been telling you to subscribe to the Exhibitionistus Files, which is a subsection of Art Thinkosaurus, which is the, you know, silly name that I gave my Substack page. But maybe some of you don't know what it is or would like to know what kind of writing I do before you go into yet another app and waste your time. So I thought of reading one of my texts about um notions of gender and preconceptions about certain times, a certain people, and progressive stances and how everything is so nuanced. And it is also about Gertrude Stein and it mentions a few other people. It talks about Gertrude Stein's role in collecting art and her role in modernist painting, uh, particularly, but also her very strange position as a writer. And so without further ado, this is what I'm going to do. I am going to do a sort of performance. Why am I calling it a performance? Because I haven't prepared anything. So I'm going to test myself uh reading for an oral apprehension or an oral enjoyment of the text that I wrote supposing you would read it. So how does it fare? So I'm gonna start. Are you ready? Okay. Here I go. G is for genius, grammar and girl. After killing the angel in the house, the Stuntman makes its appearance. Content warning this text mentions suicide. Quote Before I decided to write this book, my twenty five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of would-be geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses. So this is an excerpt from the autobiography of Alice B. Tokliss, written by Gertrude Stein in 1933. I always saw Gertrude Stein, the celebrated author of the autobiography of Alice B. Tokliss, or the outcast grammarian of The Making of Americans, published in nineteen twenty five, as someone who had the freedom to write what and how she wanted. I have an affection for her adamant self affirming passion for modernism and for her own arts. While Virginia Wolfe, another love of mine, remained doubtful about James Joyce's value as a writer, Gertrude Stein saw him as a mere follower in her usual self aggrandizing habit. Arguably, both women would later be obfuscated by his academic popularity until quite recently. Naturally, I ask myself how a woman could openly settle in Paris with her female lover and live a life of absolute creative flow without being ostracized and even astoundingly, managing to be a decisive figure in the Parisian circle of international artists and writers. This freedom was obviously due to her money, I presumed, but society isn't a linear thing. So it's far more interesting to telescope notions of art and society through modernist idealisms and their constructs of liberation. As soon as she established herself in Paris, first with her brother and after with Alice Toklus, Gertrude Stein was a patron and a peer who would support, buy, guide, and critique artists and writers. She is praised for her collection of Picasso's and Matises, among many other gems of the first half of the twentieth century. As such, she can make or break reputations, being the great organizer of Soire, for which Toklus would cook exquisite meals. There, the expatriate US writers would mingle with the European intelligentsia. It was a moment of intellectual and creative effervescence between Pablo Picasso, Tristan Zaras, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Marie Laurensin, Sylvia Beach, Andre Durand, and so many others. What a dream of contained small talk. The social events doubled as work sessions when Toklus would accompany the wives to another room so that the creatives could talk shop or so I've read many times, without the gendered contrast ever ceasing to start on me. In any other household, this would simply unnerve, but here, in the love nest of these two queer lovers, it stands out like a retrogate middle finger. Not because it is revisionist, but precisely because it empirically clarifies how the association between masculinity and authorship could simultaneously accept female creatives in its circle while maintaining a rigid structure where wives had a socioeconomic ancillary role. Stein settled in Paris in nineteen oh three. Meanwhile, Austria was receiving the fanciful gift of author Otto Weininger's book Sex and Character, which can compassionately be deemed a complicated case study of self harm using the sharp knife of misogyny. If it's positively unknown now, sex and character was discussed along with its author's self inflicted death in Austria, throughout Europe and even beyond. Weininger committed suicide at the age of twenty three, a few months after his book was published in the house where Ludwig van Beethoven lived, and which he had purposely rented because he considered the composer to have attained the status of universal genius. Nonetheless, or perhaps consequently, who can tell, Weininger's despaired opus was a lifelong reference for Ludwig Wickenstein, admired by August Srinberg, Arnold Schoenberg, and even James Joyce and many others, mainly because it solved the famous question the woman question. The difficulty with Weininger's theories pertains to the fact that they were guided by a high degree of abstraction, attempting to define a new form of psychology where specificities such as gender or religion are transcended and a higher form of humanity is created. It's a sobering adventure to read the studies of his ludicrous theories which worry whether or not Weininger was for or against modernism. To be clear, I'm as interested in Weininger as an exhistorian. However, I want to evaluate the interlacing of his repressed sexuality and concomitate and concomitant hatred for women and Judaism, more on that later, with his Austrian context of modernism Arnoux, think Gustav Klimt, and the newcomer proto minimalism, think Adolf Luz. The fact that he contributed to women's liberation by supporting their voting rights and access to education doesn't preclude him from misogyny. It confirms his aesthetic ideas of elevating a weaker and stupider form of human. But there were exceptions. Feining's theories provided a sublimated misogynistic consolation for lesbians, because it proposed that every human contained both gendered energies and was therefore by definition bisexual. So I don't say this in the text, but bisexual here is meant as we all have both genders in our body, in our being, not both sexuality tendencies. In that sense, gender for Weininger was a far more fluid notion which could almost echo current inclusive theories of gender aligned with Judith Butler, for example. But the high mindedness of this philosophy stopped there when it described the male side as active, rational, moral, logical, with productive faculties, and the female one as weak, amoral, passive, unproductive. To add insult to injury, a Jew converted into Catholicism, Weininger claimed that Judaism was a feminine culture, which was the direction Europe was taking, according to him. The blooming intricacies of Arnoux were a symptom of a terrible crisis, mining the formerly virile continent of Europe. Nevertheless, this brought good news for some, naturally, women, and even more so lesbians, who could create and produce reason and opine because they were male. Their good traits superseded the feminine ones. Therefore, Gertrude Stein, both a woman and a Jew, could read this text that seemed to exclude her from the weakness of her sex and culture because she was male. Her brother Leo led passionate discussions about Weininger's book, whereas Stein, more pragmatical, used its theories about the psychology of character to write to the making of Americans and excitedly sent copies of Weininger's book to her peers. Repression of femininity was the name of the game, providing a Herculean task to feminists of the second half of the century to disentangle societal constraints, aesthetics, and social constructs from essences, that is, the association of sex with gender. There is another notion in Weininger's theories, the genius, a quality transcending specific fields. This obsession with the genius is not new and has precedence, such as a far more complicated concept of the Übermensch coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, so the superman, and crystallizes a crisis of men seeking a new set of values. From the Russian avant garde to the futurists, art was traversed by this anxiety or excitement, depending on who you read, of rejecting the past and needing a guiding force to overcome the mediocre conventions of society. The French expatriate Henri Guudier Brichka marvelled at his feverish visits to the British Museum in London, which allowed him to visit every corner of the world, inspiring him to develop an abstract and schematic style of sculpted figures. In a brisent flow state, he enlisted in the French army in nineteen fifteen, quickly meeting his untimely death, after declaring that sculpture has no relation to classic Greek, but is continuing the tradition of the barbaric peoples of the earth for whom we have sympathy and admiration. There was no escaping, it seems, this vortex of promise and concomitant discontent, whereby the canons of European culture seemed to be pulverized by people tacitly deemed inferior, feminists, women in general, and non white ethnicities from places where a lot of the European conflicts were actually being fought. Terrorized teleologists were bleakly validated in their belief of a progressive march toward an end of some kind. Our biblical tendency to narrate the times as a thirty five millimeter motion picture unraveling toward the closing credits prefers to think transition as decline, change as impoverishment or even annihilation, which Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West later demonstrated in detail. I've been reading some fascinating texts here on Substack about the decline of the white man, of culture, of books, which I hope are militant and devotional stances to creativity, rather than power narratives subterraneously disquieted by the Colston statues coming down, hopefully making space for other societal dreams. It's fine to state that Weininger's issue concerned a vision for humanity rather than masculinity, as I've read many times. But why ignore that it hinged on women demanding to be active players for the first time as a social movement? That this added a difficulty to define what the heck the new man was going to be, and then provided an excluding factor, a first stepping stone to claim what he wouldn't be, that is, the white woman, a being removed from action, leadership, lawmaking, and creation since the dawn of time. Not that I dream of matriarchies, by the way. How do you call a non binary key? It was getting more and more difficult to ignore what Mary Shelley sorry, it was getting more and more difficult to ignore that Mary Shelley, Ada Loveless, Fanny Eaton, Marie Curie were out there, sexual and feminine creative beings, a confusing menace to Schopenhauerian exclusions of their abilities. On the other side of the spectrum, there were also males not truly male, as Schopenhauer would also claim. So there was a definite need to reinvent men, um humanity altogether. You see, Weininger was also a feminized man, a homosexual. I should not have to point out the amount of self loathing one must carry to use the word feminine as inferior. This hatred of the self I flag up, doesn't concern Gertrude Stein only, not even women in general, straight or not, but men too, of all sexual orientations, as well as other genders. This is perhaps the only beauty of Weininger's theory. It contains its antidote in its contradictions, since, as he suggested, we all have a feminine plasma, no one gets to transcend themselves without negating theirself. This is not consequently a question for women only, but for society as a whole. A society where Sigmund Freud could also look at his daughter Anna in nineteen thirty three, absorbed at her loom, and conclude that women could not have contributed much to invention. Except he mused precisely that the loom an invention stemming from the sight of pubic hair growth and a natural desire to hide an absence of penis. This is in italics in the text, and I'm paraphrasing um Sigmund Freud himself which was not really an invention, so the loom was not really an invention, but a dictate of nature, thought Freud. So in fact, women could not really create. Freud wrote this. Down and left it to posterity, so this was in his iris, without a single thought. European men walked among inferiors, whether they were against violence perpetrated against the latter or not, marked their difference, but didn't abolish violence the violences but didn't sorry, but didn't abolish violence's veiled omnipresence. Weininger, for instance, and for all his jarring anti Semitic theories, was opposed to social anti Semitism while spewing hateful theories against his former religion and culture. So what I'm getting at here is a sort of nuance one must have when looking at the past. I was very interested in analyzing up close this hero of mine, this woman who not only was writing whatever she wanted to write, and I will be quoting her later on, but also the fact that she could have a real influence on history, on the history of art by protecting Matisse and promoting Picasso and so many others, and Cezanne and all those other painters who at the time were not really understood, it was starting to be shown, but who were not really considered by society the way they are considered now. And looking into the history and trying to understand what Gertrude Stein's notions of gender had to be to adapt to society as a lesbian was really interesting in the sense that we all carry masks and we all need filters to exist when we are at the margins of society and when we want to be at its center. And I think this says a lot about the society that we're living in, where for example, black culture was revered and is revered in a very different way than in Gertrude Stein's time. Jazz was a thing, but now it's not about the music, is about giving people their voices, artists who we love but whose culture we don't respect. And now we have, of course, Latino culture in the US. So we have Bad Bunny in the Super Bowl, but the fact that we have a culture that is marginalized and persecuted at the center of media, of the mainstream, does it mean that there have been some concessions? Does it mean that it has an incidence in anonymous Latino people in America and in other places? So that's kind of what I was trying to get at. And this performance is also telling me that reading a text is not the same as or counting on the whatever's written um virtually in between the lines. I'm not sure it's passing in the same way as an oral experience. So audibly, let's continue. Easy to understand now how Trump can have people of colour in his government. The theories of sublimation and elevation associated with real identities allow for apparent exceptions to the rule because they separate the theory, the person, and the ideal value through unscientific theories that would make Bobby Kennedy junior blush. Probably for not having thought of them himself, let's face it. Everything is hierarchical, an entanglement of judgments based on power, performance, money, influence, prejudice, and a corollary ability of rulemaking. Then there's the poor idealistic creature who took the rules to the letter. For Weininger, and I'm talking about Weininger, of course, the genius is a superior being, obviously male, an all observing, rational, creative, capable of sublimating the rampant worminess of humanity into music and art. Did he succumb to the pressures of his genius within, all people have it, apparently, according to him, which could not fight his overpowering femininity? We're not far from the incel who sees women as slaves, who have to yield to his masculinity while complaining that they don't because of his inadequate physique. Or of the feminists excluding trans women from their conception of womanhood because they founded their whole identity on the principles of their diminishment. And here I I make an observation in parenthesis, forty-five percent of trans people have attempted suicide at least once in the UK last year. When the premise is wrong, there is no way to get to right. If Max Jenikov can posit that Weininger is a photo is quote, a photographic negative of his time, revealing its hidden, hateful structure, unquote, what does incel and transphobic culture say of us now? To my young self, Gertrude Stein was understandably a light in the past showing the potential for a whole fire in the present. After all, my mother still had to ask my father for permission to leave the country for a good part of her adult life. And what didn't say in the text is that of course my father didn't make my mum do that. Long after Germany and Italy had gotten rid of their dictatorships, Portugal was steeped in its own version of fascism. I am Portuguese and I my parents live there, grew up there, I grew up there. Two days ago, fifty-eight alt-right MPs were voted into the Portuguese Parliament after almost fifty years of what was called the Iberian Exception, that is no extreme right wing parties. The leader of the party I refuse to name believes that a woman who has an abortion should have her uterus removed forcibly. So I came to believe that this agency and power came to Stein through something external, a form of power she could have, a form sorry, a form of power she could have, provided she wasn't demonstrative in regular society. What do I mean by that? Demonstrative in the sense that of course, no embracing, no manifestations of her sexuality, so no kissing, Alice, basically. I concluded it must have been the most vulgar and disappointing of tools, so that got her that power, money. Stein was an heir who had the privilege to go to university and study with the philosopher William James, to drop out and decide to study midwifery at John Hopkins instead, to move to Europe, settle for Paris, and start an art collection with her brother Leo. Granted, her chosen artist was very expensive then. Now I imagine that her American education must have been an even more discombobulating time for her, from flings with women to coming to terms with her aspirations. She had admiration for James, but didn't buy his pragmatist philosophy, Sir William James. So more importantly, the most important thing of all, she was trying to figure out what the heck her philosophical, philosophical and linguistic vision was. Also a form of misogyny then, to forget that a female author's most consuming troubles were the feverish quest of finding her form, her nomadic writing, and accepting her love of repetition, of soliloquies, of grammar. Stein moved to Paris to be freer, and also, I suppose, to go back to where her parents had taken her, to get an education, to see art, to speak other languages. She was rich, she got the education of rich women who had well meaning parents, albeit still tainted with exclusion. Not unlike Virginia Wolfe, but whose European education wasn't as institutional. The other James Henry, so there were brothers, William James and Henry James, wrote about these discrepancies between the American and the British white woman, which ultimately led to the same destinies of destitution without a male protector or personal wealth. But both Stein and Wolfe were of a certain social stratum. Wolfe referred to James Joyce pejoratively in her diary on the sixteenth of august nineteen twenty two as a quote self-taught working man, unquote. She was posh. Entitled, as she felt, to more attention from T. S. Elliot, who was enthralled by James Joyce's Ulysses. So for all his advantages of being a man, Joyce was still a poor sod, and for all their advantages of being rich, white, and or with access to a powerful community of opinion makers, Stein and Wolfe were still women. Recent history told us who was more powerful. Present and future history will tell us other tales of their posterity while their lives deserve nuanced and open eyed scrutiny. Which I think was what I was trying to do. The present tells us that we've come to a point where not only we've re-evaluated the quality, but also look at the movements we studied through the context they emerged with in and against all at once. Wolf dreamt of writing uninterruptedly. Stein decided that her gatherings took place on Saturdays so that she had time to write during the week without interruptions. When no one would write her biography to promote what she relentlessly described as her genius, she wrote one herself but of a different kind I went to see Mrs. Stein, who had, in the meantime, returned to Paris, and there, at her house I met Gertrude Stein. I was impressed by the choral brooch she wore and by her voice. I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius, and each time a bell within me rang, and I was not mistaken. And I may say in each case it was before there it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several great people, but I have only known three first class geniuses, and each case on sight within me something rang. In no one of the three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full life began unquote The autobiography of Alice B. Tauklis by Gertrude Stein. In a self serving and outrageous manner, Mrs. Stein wrote the autobiography of her life partner, Alice B. Tokless, which is the most ambitious, ambivalent and ambiguous piece of literature I can think of. Gertrude Stein gives voice to her lover with the evident goal of obliquely focusing on herself. If you read any biography of Stein's, you can be certain that she did not buy Weininger's theory, which only allowed her to be half as good as a universal genius, obligatory male. She had an almost narcissistic sense of her own value, and applied the G substantive to herself, so G as an genius, all the time. In the autobiography, the G epithet establishes the narrative immediately as a premise. Moreover, Stein had a social aura talkless lacked. The latter is often described as a crone, whereas Stein is perceived as formidable, but yet affable. Only someone cherished would be able to write so brazenly about her peers as she did in the autobiography, and remain unscarred by it. Not to say that Matisse and Hemingway weren't positively fuming. One can estimate, according to the Goud, that Toklas was more female than Stein, who was commanding like a Roman emperor. If you like your women to look like Roman emperors, unquote, Hemingway remarked. But he wrote later, illuminating Stein's self serving theories. She, Stein, used to talk to me about homosexuality, and how it was fine in and for women, and no good in men, and I used to listen and learn, and I always wanted to fuck her, and she knew it. How easy to imagine that Stein had no regard for Toklus's inner life When Fort Maddox Ford was editing the Transatlantic Review, he once said to Gertrude Stein I'm a pretty good writer and a pretty good editor, and a pretty good businessman, but I find it very difficult to be all three at once. I'm a pretty good housekeeper, and a pretty good gardener, and a pretty good needlewoman, and a pretty good secretary, and a pretty good editor, and a pretty good vet for dogs, and I have to do to them all at once, and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author. About six weeks ago, Gertrude Stein said It does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I'm going to do? I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robison Crusoe. And she has, and this is it. The autobiography of Alice B. Tokless by Gertrude Stein. Stein must have been a formidable woman, a force not many had the will or the gumption to contradict. That is, apart from her readership. While her previous books were mostly ignored, the autobiography of Alice B. Tauklus was a success. That humili that humiliated her. While absolutely elated to earn a considerable amount of money from the book, she despised it. She didn't want to be recognized for a book she wrote out of relative despair for not being recognized as the genius she knew to be. By all accounts, the autobiography wasn't at all the book where she placed the grammarian love she had for the verb and the adverb and utter disregard for nouns. Nouns, according to her, are known things. They're fixed. Why write about them? A sentence must move a sentence is proof that there is future and this is Getstein. Toklus was thus a mere noun maybe. I have said that a noun is a name of anything by definition, that is what it is, and a name of anything is not interesting, because once you know its name, the enjoyment of naming is over. And therefore in writing prose names, that is nouns, are completely uninteresting. But and that is a thing to be. So this was horribly read. So this is the beauty of Gertrude Stein, and that's why she fascinates me. I love her writing. I love the way she despises grammar or loves grammar, on the contrary, but she despises the concessions that you make to a sort of um conventional use of grammar and a focus on nouns. So it is very difficult to read her because there's not really punctuation and there's a sort of rhythm that you have to catch. And I didn't catch it here. And I love reading Gertrude Stein out loud. And actually, I have a little anecdote. I I think I left her book, The World Is Round. The round is the world. I can't remember the title, but it's a sort of a circle, and the title, it's a children's book, or supposedly a children's book, and it says the world is round and round and round the world is, something like that. And one of my so my one of my two sons slept in the same bedroom, and apparently one of them read to the other from that book as a sort of a joke because he found it so ridiculous that he kept on reading it. But the reality is that he read it. He read it every night. So there's something fascinating about Gertrude Stein. So let me try again. Quote I have said that a noun is a name of anything by definition, that is what it is. I have said that a noun is a name of anything by definition that is what it is, and the name of anything is not interesting, because once you know its name, the enjoyment of naming it is over, and therefore in writing prose names, that is nouns, are completely uninteresting. But and that is a thing to be remembered, you can love a name, and if you love a name, then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more, more violently, more persistently, more tormentedly. Anybody knows how anybody calls out the name of anybody one loves. And this is from Gertrude Stein Poetry and Grammar. By naming Alice in the title of her book, with her own name under hers as the author, wasn't Stein proclaiming the two loves of her life Alice first and her own genius next. In the prose itself, where names are fixed and die, it's her own name Stein that comes time and time again, eight hundred and sixty six times to Tauklus's eight. A title is a title is a title. A writer is a bully, as Joan Didian reminds us. Writers take a page and through it shout, whisper, cajole, seduce, abuse, disown, and alarm their readers. So there's a shift here in the text, and I announce it, actually. My attention shifts to Alice now. She remains the cipher in this story, the recipient of our pity, but mostly our disregard. We see her as the non writer, the non genius, and it is us who find that category inferior. I write this based on a lot of things that. I read about these two women. Not because at the end of the book, Stein Toklus enumerates Alice's roles as traditionally feminine. She is indeed, quote, the housekeeper, which is to say the gardener. Sorry, this is not a quote. So I'm quoting from the text the many activities that Alice is said to have. So she is indeed the housekeeper, which is to say the gardener, needlewoman, secretary, editor of everyone's life, and Stein's books, as many authors' wives were in the past, and still are probably. Oh, and Dogvet, she was gifted. Active, prolific. But she's indirectly feminine as in Weininger's summarized spirit of the times. We see her as the genius adjacent, the inferior female, irrational and immoral spirit, to Stein's productive masculinity. I still remember the day I heard a locally famous Portuguese writer and critic declare on TV that a genius should be accommodated and given more leeway to misbehave. He must know, I thought, his mum is a famous poet. Now I see that he must have been referring to himself too, as he was about to start a writing career. So we see Alice as the inferior person, the person who had the destiny to accommodate because she was loved by a genius and wasn't one herself, and although her personality was far from subservient, not once do we think that Alice B. Toklus loved, was loved, and understood deeply libidinally the need for Stein to tell her own story, although at times it must have felt like she was the brunt of the joke. Stein was a misogynist in a misogynist society and chose to historicize herself with the ancestral concepts of patriarchs. She did the most transgressive thing you can do in our ego obsessed nature. She borrowed the contrasting narrowness of Alice's persona as a literary device, a shrewd disguise in her beloved writing. Sorry, so she borrowed the contrasting narrowness of Alice's persona as a literary device, a shrewd disguise in her beloved writing her into history as a genius and not as a rich, idle American eccentric, set free by her parents' money and the confusing eroticism of her butch queerness, if Hemingway's lust can be offered as the parameter of society's suppressed concupicence. Quote The highest form of eroticism as much as the lowest form of sexuality uses the woman not for herself, but as a means to an end, to preserve the individuality of the artist. The artist has used the woman merely as a screen on which to project his own idea. Woman is nothing but man's expression and projection of his own sexuality. Every man creates himself a woman in which he embodies himself and his own guilt. She is only a part of man, his other, the ineradicable, his lower parts, and this is taken from sex and character by Otto Weininger Going back to the text. Weininger explains male self hatred as the inherency of woman in himself, to which one can respond with far more society societal realism that some, too many, heterosexual men hate women because their desire affirms female ascendance, and when this ascendance loses power through old age, menopause or any deviance from its demanding parameters. So here I include another statistic sixty one percent of femicides are committed by a current or former partner in the UK. None of this applies to lesbian relationships, although the disposal of gender by Weininger does diffuse its influence as a psychological trait. Weininger is one of those distilling thinkers who reflect transcendentally, not immersively. So he goes further in saying that sexuality is to be transcended, overcome, denied to attain a sublimated form of existence. Ultimately for him, both femininity and masculinity must be overcome to conquer the Olympus of asexuality. In her book Parade, Rachel Cusk imagines several characters named G, the first one being a painter who doesn't believe women can be artists, or thinks his wife, who doesn't believe that he could be a man and an artist without a wife. And there it is very acutely explained why Picasso didn't want his wives to be artists. One day, his wife is struck on the head so bluntly that she doesn't quite understand what happened to her until she sees her attacker far away raising her fists at her. A woman. A crowd gathers around her as she bleeds on her hands and knees. This event distresses her profoundly. She can't shake off a feeling of having been murdered while remaining alive, relating this state of death in life to everything she'd done in connection with her femininity. And all of those actions, she acknowledges, were performed by what she calls a stuntman, separate from other aspects of her life. Leafing through a book illustrating the work of a nineteenth century female artist also named G, so we presume that G in Kask's book is genius, but in my title presumes it might be girl or grammar, and whose self-portraits were completed shortly before her death in childbirth. She thinks about the condition of the woman artists. So I'm gonna start over so that you understand because I interrupted the sentence. Leafing through a book illustrating the work of a nineteenth century female artist also named G, and whose self portraits were completed shortly before her death in childbirth, she thinks about the condition of the woman artist, so the woman who was attacked. There is another painting of G's husband sleeping, not even undressed, with his glasses still on. A sentence about it strikes me so this is from a parade by Rachel Cusk. The painting is an exercise in mild wonder, wonder at the familiarity and yet unknowability of this being, her husband. Wonder perhaps at his entitlement to simply fall asleep like that. Wonder at the artist's own power to perceive him when he doesn't know he's being watched, as women perceive their husbands from deep within their subjugation to them. The male body is entitled to be at ease and easiness never really afforded or attained by women. It's as if she concludes G was asking what female art might look like and concluding that it could only be a sort of non existence. When she was hit on the head, the stuntman the stuntman replaced her. Memories of childbirth, of all the female duties and their forceful obscurity came flooding back. If she could have erased her past she would have, but now the stuntman had taken over. The woman who hit her and whose gender made it difficult to tell the story, as if it was shameful, had forced her to represent herself. The stuntman's violence had been gifted back to her. Because she knew that the crowd was looking at her like a picture in a museum, waiting, they wanted nothing more than to ignore the act of brutality, so it was up to her to locate it in time and space. If it had been a man, she would have felt that the attack was deserved. But being hit by a woman was both outrageous and a present. And that's it. That's the text I wanted to read you. So this is not going to be edited. This was a sort of a performance because I wanted to um do this sort of passage from something that was written, imagining that someone would read it or that someone would use the voice aid, so the audio feature that Substack has with the text. So I know many dyslexics who uh have trouble focusing on the written word, and so they read while they listen to the reading of the text while reading the words. It allows them to enter the sort of rhythm of um a written structure, and this is really interesting because it made me think of the fact that the body is involved in writing, it's involved in reading, and it's involved in orality. I don't want to tell you what I think of this whole thing of uh literacy being in a sort of downfall of um orality taking over again. There's a lot of theories about that. I think I may write about it at some point um on Substack, but I have other things to write before that. But I wanted to leave this sort of performance here with all my mistakes, with uh thoughts that arise while I'm reading, because it is a sort of um performance talking. So you can see the difference here while I'm speaking as I think in comparison to reading and trying to place my voice, trying to find the tone, trying to meet the rhythm of the text. And I think most writings, you know, especially in that period where we didn't have podcasts, where everything was very compartmentalized, you had TV, you had books, then you had radio, and nothing was transversal as it is now. Um I think that most texts were made with the assumption that the posture would be just taking a book, sitting somewhere, and reading it silently and using your imagination. No one reads a novel out loud, it is written by your inner voice or is read by your inner voice. It is both written and read by a sort of inner voice. There's a sort of telepathic, delayed telepathic thing going on. Whereas when you're talking to someone, the body is present in a different way, you're improvising, and you are thinking in a different way. So, my point here is that embodying something differently, so voice as opposed to inner voice, even when there's um an audio version of a written text, is completely different than to stand here and voice my thoughts as they arrive. It also means that podcasts are prepared. Uh, we don't just hit record and start talking. Obviously, there's a script, obviously, um, when people have time to, which is not really my case, you can even um rehearse the episode. You can previously meet with guests and define how the topics are going to be approached, in what order. So it's very different. It is orality is also prepared, but it is a performance, it is something that you do in the moment, even if you edit. It is a different kind of thinking, it is a different kind of pace. Um, we're talking a lot about um speed at the moment with AI. So machines are often replacing us because they're quicker. And so what happens is the question of speed. Texts are written slowly. I always say that writing is editing, writing is not just kind of jotting down thoughts and there it goes. As podcasts aren't, as oral recordings aren't, they are edited, obviously, but the difference in speed, the difference in the relationship between the word and thinking are very different. And I think this is really fascinating. It's fascinating to think that now we have so many platforms and so many performances of the mind and the body to help us think differently. So, what do they do? What are the advantages and disadvantages of write communicating through writing, communicating orally? What are those differences? Because, as you know, I have a segment called Art Stories where I read a text, but of course, you're not going to be surprised to um learn that the text is written for an oral performance. I would never publish that text. So there it goes. There are differences. This was a test. I hope you enjoyed it. I really enjoyed rereading my texts. I'm one of those freaks who sometimes likes to reread what they wrote. Not all, not all of the texts, but I really like like but I really like this one. Um, I like that it's nuanced, I like that it goes into writing as a sort of exploration of psychology, but also of the times. It I think proves that whatever school you're from, against biographies, uh, for biographies, against the equivalence between an artist's production and the time they live in, are just very dogmatic. And if you start having fun with research, you get to a nuanced place and you get to my favorite word, which is perhaps. I love the perhaps, and that's one of the things that I really loved when I was reading um In Search of Lost Time, a la recherche du temps perdu. I read it in French, and I noticed that he used the expression peut-être, perhaps, all the time. The narrator, so that book is um uh a feat because it's so long and it's a narrator, he was never named, describing many things, his way of discovering the world and society and how things change and how even change changes, as Luis de Camoines, the great Portuguese um poet, epic poet said, um, it is an amazing book, and the narrator holds immense power because it is through their perspective that we learn everything, and that's why that's such a beautiful form of writing by Marcel Proust, the author, which is that because the writer is a bully, and maybe the narrator, when there's only a single point of view, is also perhaps imposing their views, Proust writes with hypotheses, and so he writes peut-être, peut-être, all the time, perhaps, perhaps. And I think that's the greatest pleasure of all, isn't it? To hold different ways of looking at something and realizing that probably, probably there's a bit of truth in all of them. So my Substack is called Art Thinkosaurus, there's a membership option, or there's only a sort of um donation as um a payment up front of I think 25 pounds, so probably 28 euros or something like that, and you know, whatever currency you use. So, you know, your support is much appreciated. So thank you so much to those who are supporters, to those who are members, to those who donate. Um, and if you're thinking of um following in the wake of those who do, the links are in there in the show's notes for you. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening, thank you for sticking around, and tell me what you think of this performance of sorts. Bye-bye. Take care. See you next time. Bye. Exhibition This is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevis. Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life.