One of the most infamous images of Douglas Darden is his self-portrait at the front of his book Condemned Building, on which I have previous written upon — actually this was the first piece on which I ever wrote on Darden so many years ago. This image is so central to the rest of the book that it is the very first image we see. It depicts Darden wearing a nun's habit and lifting it up to reveal a very large, spherical set of tits, based on a drawing by Jean-Jacques LeQueu.
Darden's fascination with gender and transgenderism is not political. He was exploring gender before transgenderism became heavily politicized in recent years of social and civic unrest. His fascination with transgenderism appears to come from LeQueu, in particular Philippe Duboy's LeQueu: An Architectural Enigma. In this tome, Duboy explores several drawings executed by LeQueu which explore transgenderism, namely gender swapping, transvestitism, hermaphroditism, &c. Obviously LeQueu is exploring genderism long before it was even remotely a political issue. LeQueu's explorations of gender was likely an extension of his studies on character, namely the physical expression of certain parts of the body yield certain qualities in personality and preferences, e.g. phrenology. LeQueu does an extensive set of drawings that geometrical map the physical manifestations of the human body to create an "ideal" human, and deviations from that "ideal" give insight into deviations in the personality. So when he draws himself with a huge rack, he is exploring his own personality but with huge tits.
Ultimately LeQueu is not doing anything political, but rather social transgressions, like the divine Marquis de Sade. LeQueu is transgressing when he draws himself with huge tits or wearing a dress; LeQueu is transgressing by drawing pornography. Duboy believes Marcel Duchamp is making an homage to LeQueu, or at least it is easier to understand LeQueu's pornography and transgenderism through the lens of Duchamp, namely in the alter ego Rrose Selavy.
Darden, of course, was familiar with Duboy's book, and clearly is making an homage to LeQueu and Duchamp by drawing himself with huge tits.
But this is not a mere matter of transgenderism and the exploration thereof. It is an exploration in identity and social values. Darden was obviously fascinated by the obscene and transgressive, but he was also an artist. So in looking at Darden's explorations of transgenderism, we must ask some questions.
Firstly, is this pornography? Is this erotic-artistic or is it created for sexual arousal or a sick joke? The first has artistic merit, while the latter two we might define as pornography. To quote Justice Stewart in Jacobellis vs. Ohio concerning obscenity: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of materials I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it."
Obviously Darden is being an artist. Yet, if we take Facebook's algorithm for censorship as any indication, you can see nipples. It is a nip slip. When LeQueu drew his Et Nous Aussi Nous Serons Meres, Car........! he was being obscene; he was also being blasphemous. He is illustrating a nun lifting her habit and revealing, not just tits, but nipples as well. Today we might see this as art, but in the 18th century, LeQueu knew he was creating pornography. Of course, LeQueu is doing this two centuries ago. Our perceptions of pornography and smut changes over time. I believe it was Bataille who argued that the more pornography we make, the less filthy the world is: that is, to increase transgression, we need less porn. In economic terms, albeit not in terms of the Accursed Share, transgression is the value system, and the more scarce the pornography the more valuable/transgressive pornography will be.
If we see big titted skinny bitches in bikinis on billboards making out with half-clad buff dudes, if we see camel-toes and crotch-taco lines on every woman advertised, if we can see the impressions of the mushroom cap of a male sock through Calvin Klein underwear on television... these things make pornography less transgressive. We have become desensitized to these things. The transgression is much less valuable than in LeQueu's day. Thus, while LeQueu was making porn, Darden is making art. The perception of transgression has diminished since LeQueu. Yet, still, Darden is making an homage to porn.
Next, is this a positive representation of transgenderism? Consider for a moment the books and films of Cliver Barker's Hellraiser franchise, which might be one of the greatest queer and kink films and books. However, this is not a positive representation of the queer and kink community, so it is usually not celebrated and sometimes totally ignored. Bernard Tschumi recognizes that architectural theorists are prudes and their discourse is exceedingly tame, and sought to discuss transgression in architecture ("Architecture and Transgression," Architecture and Disjunction). Bataille influenced both Hellraiser and Tschumi. So what is the purpose of transgression in architecture if we are not going to actually transgression or give true expression to sin and horror? Even Tschumi's paper is relatively tame. Some of his Advertisements for Architecture are raw and fucked up, like this one below, but most are still not that transgressive — e.g. the advertisement that suggests that Le Corbusier's Villa Savoy was more Architecture (with a Capital A) when it was abandoned and dilapidated.
Ultimately we have a conflict of perceptions. In recognizing Darden's expressions of transgenderism, we might perceive him as positively representing and expressing transgenderism, or giving artistic expression to gender non-conformity. Yet, at the same time, we have to recognize that Darden is also exploring transgression and depravity. We are in that strange and uncertain area of life and expression that Darden called "the Underbelly."
The Underbelly: that which is underneath, under the clothes, beneath, &c. Everything Darden is exploring in Condemned Building is an exploration of the Underbelly. It is the unconventional, the obscene, the dark, the unexpected, the taboo, the horror. So in a way, Darden has flipped over pornography and found artistic expression within it. Not like what Justice Stewart said, but that it is pornography and it is art. It is obscene and it has cultural merit.
Ultimately, we can see this. We can look at his self-portrait, we can look at Sex Shop, and acknowledge that they are transgressive and artistic, but also an expression of transgenderism (in a political way).
I think the following commentary from Darden in Rob Miller's 1992 interview with Darden, Looking After the Underbelly, best exemplifies his philosophies of transgenderism and gender as a spectrum:
"If I was to truly engage the aspect of the Underbelly through the notion of gender, I think it would probably not be so much a woman per se as to deal with the overlap, to deal with androgyny, its to deal with what is common and in being common it is idiosyncratic that cannot be fit so nicely into the categories of being male or a female. What is most threatening, in other words, for the Underbelly is not the diametric opposite, of saying if you're yin then do yang, or if you're male then be a female. What is truly part of the Underbelly is the threatening relationship we have to our way of thinking about things, that if it broke down would not be able to be only a male or a female, organic or inorganic...
Although I am not a woman, I think [Gustave] Flaubert did something, achieved something that many men and women, human beings at large understood, which was to be a woman. And I started to do a project called Night School from the standpoint of being a woman. Because what I think is important is to be a human being, and as a man, I don't think its so easy to be a woman. And I don't mean to caricature a woman, I don't mean to dress like a woman, or something like that, I mean to be a woman. And I don't think, from just a hormonal standpoint, that is a domain that is, as a man, a different domain than what it means to be a man. From a hormonal standpoint, men have estrogen and progesterone. They don't have as much as women, proportionally, but they have it. And women have testosterone. They don't have as much testosterone as men, but they have it. So you see... the world isn't divide by men and women, it's just a continuity of a spectrum, of which, that probably at any given moment or any given day you might have more estrogen than another day, a woman might have more testosterone. Because the hormones don't work as quantities, fixed quantities within every person. They're sliding all the time. So if you take it from just the pure hormonal standpoint, we have some women in us as men and we have some men within us as women." (Transcribed by myself)
In other words, Darden views gender as a spectrum, like many queer, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals believe today. He uses hormone balances as one piece of evidence. Today transgender advocates point to expressions of the chromosomes themselves, or use examples like the multitude of genders in mushrooms, &c. Regardless, Darden probably had a positive and fair perception of transgenderism and expressions of gender long before it became political hot button.
And let us remember that he double majored in literature and psychology at CU Boulder in undergrad. He had a psychology background and probably understood gender on other levels as well, not just a hormonal or physical aspect, but also mental, neurological, and abstract identity expressions.
[Edit: it occurs to me now, later, that there is another example of transgenderism in Darden's work... well, unfinished work: Laughing Girls. Darden writes in his drawings that Poly is Polyxena and Cass is Cassandra, and Helen is simply Helen of Troy. However, the relation of Cass and Poly as twins in Laughing Girls with a girl named Helen leads me to believe that they are feminizations of Castor and Pollux, the celestial twins (Gemini, Dioscuri) and brothers of Helen of Troy. I believe Darden is covering his tracks, misdirecting — what Duchamp called Archaeology of Knowledge. I think Darden is gender-swapping Castor and Pollux, and this is reinforced with their association with the Dardanelles.]
I suppose one question to ask would be: was Douglas Darden transgender? No, I don't think so. I think he was really fucking weird and I wish I was born two decades earlier so I could study under him, but I don't think he was transgender.
[Edit: I was recently revisiting the essay by Chapman and Ostwald in which they explore the concept of Darden needing a female body: "It implies a dissatisfaction with his own diseased body and a philosophical yearning for a new one." They explore how it is the female nurse in Oxygen House that mediates life and death, disease and health for Burden Abraham and then link this to the self-portrait of Darden taking on a female body. Something worth exploring more.]
I think he was a master storyteller, a master narrator. I think he was perfectly capable of getting into someone else's head or working under the guise of someone else. Like an actor getting into their role through immersion, effectively always being that character, this is what I think Darden was doing when he says he designed Night School as a woman. He didn't start wearing dressing or adopting feminine mannerism, but rather endeavored to think and calculate like a woman while designing. I imagine he did these sort of mental exercises a lot. Oxygen House must have been designed from the standpoint of knowing that you are dying, and he was dying; he just didn't know it yet. I can only imagine what other projects were designed as.
I believe Darden accepted a part of himself that was feminine, in a Jungian way, but perhaps also in a hormonal way, and chose to express it in Condemned Building. I think he admired Duchamp and LeQueu in a way that compelled himself to emulate them in his art. I think there was no limit to the kind of personalities and characters Darden could be, and I think therefore that the interpretations of his conceptions and expressions of transgenderism are limitless.
No comments:
Post a Comment