I came to this exhibition with hopes no higher than a snake’s chin, expecting to be underwhelmed, annoyed at being underwhelmed, and vexed by the intrusion of miserable memories of the Sensationalists.

But within moments I thought it was great, the best installation I’d ever seen, and moving in all the necessary modalities, - thinking and feeling and wonder.

Fine or even plastic art, or even criticism of these, are not my media. So this piece is not remotely proper criticism. But I hope it is worth more than dumb snake-droppings. I take my aesthetic bearings from Aristotle, Kant and Edgar Wind: whose shoelaces I am not fit to tie, but do dare to play cats-cradle with! (Of our time I like Jonathon Jones of The Guardian and Emily Braun of New York.) I am also aware from the artist’s side, the desire to abstain from explanation, let alone justification, of the created work. Some famous gambits:

1: Lady Bracknell type-critic.

2: Mr Young Anorak

3 : Mr Old Anorak

4: Mr Critical Daylight

Of course all art is an aesthetic idea made material through technology : ink, sound, paint, dance-steps. Some artists are so modest they feel they have never had an original aesthetic idea: others are so vain they feel they have uncountably many fizzing inside them. I do know what an aesthetic idea is: and most importantly that it is not an intellectual idea ‘dipped’ in Art.

I thought Harvey’s ‘painting’ was weak and perverse. (Of course I would not ban it, or prevent its being exhibited.) Its feeble concept – for it was barely an aesthetic idea – seemed to be "Compose a representation of a notorious murderer using the sign of his/her victims: and then blow up to a forbidding scale."

I respect the artist’s refusal to give me a(nother) handle – "And, here’s the meaning in a different format!" And yet, by a curious coincidence, I know I am in the presence of weak and failed art, or even ‘bad’ art, when I have a sensation of an inner voice saying to the work of art:
"And?"

Contained in this expostulation is Dylan’s absolute unmovedness:
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

a) Could an artist make a bust/sculpture of Himmler – the weediest, specciest uberNazi. – using only such 1920s –1940 spectacles?

b) Could some of the original victims’s spectacles be used?

c) Where could such an art-work best be displayed – Tate Berlin? Dachau?

Or, does such a realisation of such an aesthetic idea contain too much insensitivity, too little awe and compassion at suffering, and thus implicitly too much mockery? Is de trop an aesthetic category? And in fact don’t those very qualities add up to a perverted consciousness?

When I saw this I got the gist immediately, and felt it was one of the greatest pieces of art-lit-criticism I’d ever seen : offering a unified aesthetic and moral response. I knew I couldn’t unravel it exactly. In 25 years I’ve yet to meet a scholar or culture-vulture who can. Isn’t it is obvious that there are very, very few artists, in any medium, who are as grown-up as Wind desperately hopes for?

Within seconds, I sensed I had got the piece. Following that I was aware of two aspects to the experience of inexhaustibility – surely a necessary criterion of a work art.

(ii) I was aware of the mobility of affect correlated with the aesthetic ideas the piece had brought fizzing comfortably into my mind: there was a Kantian sense of balance. Unlike intellectual ideas these would not crystallise perfectly but would sway like the ocean in Solaris. I was also aware of thoughts, memories and feelings sparking at the edge of consciousness, magnetised by the aesthetic ideas released: and that I should be careful not to impose too many of these onto the work.

In the curious psychology of perception/apperception, one identifies/knows the presence of an aesthetic idea by the felt sense in the head and gut, and also by a unified awareness of a comprehensible intellectual idea stretched to the point of puzzlement by a barely identifiable affect which, also containing the affect of puzzlement, compounds it. (Think of an erection, a full-of-milk breast, swollen tongue or even the curious full-tension in the head when ‘something’ trying to be remembered is on ‘the tip of the tongue’.)

I won’t give a plain, uninterpreted, description of the whole of the piece. But as I try to describe my response using aesthetic ideas I will of course describe certain parts.

My thesis is that the piece is a brilliant (re)presentation of certain fundamental maturational tasks a human child (in any culture) must engage with. These are best expressed as paired concepts. (I’ve discussed elsewhere the two tasks that are almost pre-conditional to any reasoning: to understand the concept of contrary as well as opposite, and the perils of transposition and generalisation. Matte Blanco is the genius of this realm.) Experientially, at the art-work, these pairs will melt and blend into each other and into other pairs. But for exposition and analysis I must separate them.

1 : STILL – MOVING/LIFE

An artwork is said to be a world. This is more instantly true of a performance work – drama, film in a theatre – which includes the characters of the living world, doing the living thing – moving. Works in a gallery are distinguished by their stillness. But of course inside the still spectator all is moving. Eliot, like Keats, tries to find a metaphor for this experience.

The first thing that strikes the see-er - the viewer /vidience & hearer /audience - of the piece is that, though being an art installation it is necessarily bounded, fixed and still, it also contains moving parts and the sounds moving things make. Putting together the ideas of movement & absence of persons one concludes one is dealing with some sort of machine. Can one say that the installation is a "machine about a child’s imagination"? What leaps out even as one sees them perfectly fitting are the dolls – micro-machines in various stages of assembly and disassembly.

A young child is soon confronted with the mighty philosophical puzzles – that all life is movement but not all movement is life: and that movement can either be intentional & active or unintentional, caused in some other way, and endured. It is important to keep in mind that a child doesn’t have a concept of death, only of life interrupted. They know the word ‘dead’ but see it as a form of sleep: so expect the dead person/animal to get up, to stop playing-dead. In 2000 I came across in a Guardian letter the most beautiful example of a child puzzling over the concepts of living, movement and machine.

Now, at the level of actual (shared) reality, at the malls and at the tube-station, the little girl can think, compare, how BIG escalators are and how LITTLE are her legs. From these and from the concept of ‘toy’, she might have daydreamed, even before visiting the Dome, about a big-doll-body, so big one would need ladders or escalators to get to the top, inside or out. But her thought, and this is what connects it to PHANTASY, is that she MIGHT have escalators INSIDE her legs. But in this phantasy the idea of AGENCY is in suspense: for she KNOWS she can’t GET-ON her own legs. Nor can her own legs GET-ON her, for WHERE is the HER that her legs could get-on? The phantasy shows her trying to make sense of the puzzle of ‘willed-motion’ and beyond this, the criteria for ‘aliveness’. This child has negotiated the dangers of alexthymia - being or feeling unable to find or use words - and performed a very complex linguistic, conceptual and psychological operation. She has taken something in: it is, at its most rudimentary, an idea of a force over which she has no control, but which crucially, she has given a shape and name. It is possible that if this child had already done some work on this fundamental puzzle, what she was doing with her remark was being playful with her mum.

The infant first learns that joy and pleasure, and sometimes only urgent relief, depend upon willingly taking something into its body or willingly letting something out of its body. Later it learns the complex pleasures and ambivalent reliefs of refusing to take something in or refusing to let something out. These things acquire names – (milk)food, piss, shit, vomit. The uncertainty of control, and the attendant anxiety, viz shame, is wonderfully captured in Scarlett by a detached (doll’s)-bottom. Both male and female toddlers confront the absolute fact that they do not produce milk. The two most puzzling things for them that can be

in-the-body are the penis, which begins-outside and is put-inside, and the baby which is ‘somehow’ already-inside the mother.

Blood is different from the other live-media above because its appearance is quite unlike theirs. The abiding enigma of its arrival is perfectly captured in Sylvia Plath’s poem Cut. She, thirty something, is looking at the finger she has accidently cut.

The metaphor harks back to children’s toy soldiers. It is difficult to know when a child gets to understand the concept of circulation, specifically of blood and inside them. Perhaps seeing ponds, lakes and rivers implants ‘half’ the concept. Children are fascinated by waterways. I think few children get it from animals and their corpses. Ted Hughes famously spoke proudly and without regret of a Yorkshire childhood that included countless killings and tearings of animal bodies. To say, as I’d like, this was atavistic and hardly proto-zoological studies, is to make a powerful value-judgement. Nor should one lose the similarity with the childhood pleasures of serial killers.

Scarlett includes the deeply affecting tableau of the eternally sawn bird and (its) blood in circulation.

Psychoanalysts argue that such preoccupations with the insides of others (humans and animals) is a transparent displacement from the unmanageable anxiety with respect to the penis and the baby. Klein defines human envy by the child’s desolation at the baby inside the mother, and human rage by its desire/fantasy to scour out the mother’s womb. More hopefully these psychotic feelings eventually ‘trip over’ to the realisation of having damaged the loved object (mother) and then to what Malan called ‘the miracle of the depressive position’ which is manifest as reparation and creativity.

Here is a controversial point. Can one say that the legacy of (or the positional shift to) the desire to scour can be seen in the sexual desire to fist. The full forearm fisting is the furthest one person can get ‘inside’ another person without mechanical or surgical aids. When does such a hand know it has arrived? Even if it is painless, one could say that it is a pursuit of something as doomed as the famous definition of the pursuit of justice: " A blind man in a darkened room looking for a black cat that isn’t there!"

There is an anvil in the installation, not far from the bits of dolls and diagonal to the sliced, feathered-bird. When I saw this I immediately thought of two things:

ii) In the loveliest metaphor for the cunt, and Rochester did use this word, the poet spoke of it as "on this soft anvil all mankind was made"

How strange to learn, in the children’s game, that paper beats stone, the envelope beats the pillar, the vagina ‘beats’ the penis. Then what is the scissors? The tongue? Sticks and stones may….

An embrace, especially a hug, in infancy or old age, is a curious experience combining sensations of softness and hardness. It is an absolutely necessary learning as well as soothing experience: which includes not only the identification of two types of sensation, but also the identification of negotiation – a part of one’s body may be requested, offered, received or denied to another person – to facilitate them. Children only get a sense of their own body’s boundary from pressing on another person’s. It is exhilarating to press with all one’s might. But for the other person to be whole-enough, alive-enough, themself-enough for me to use, I must not crush them metaphorically or literally. Even girls, six or sixteen, like to wrestle, to press hard, to have their softness and harness meet another person’s softness and hardness. This fact was known even in a far more sexist era. I was in awe when I heard a 16 year-old girl at my school singing:

If I was the marrying kind,
And thank the Lord I’m not Sir.
The kind of man I would marry
Would be a rugby full-back.
He’d push hard, and I’d push hard
We’d push hard together.
We’d have fun in the middle of the night,
Both pushing hard together!

I’ve added the emphasis to that final mighty line. It is the most perfect definition of good (with-gusto) human sex: what is to be known of one’s own body and of one’s partner’s body is knowable here, in this way. Interestingly it also beautifully appropriates the homo-eroticism in the actual rugby match! Anything other than that mutually respectful and coordinated pushing hard is perverse – bullying, sadism masochism etc etc… The pre-pubescent version of this is of course kids, girls & boys, just pushing and then embracing and both falling down laughing. As I said above there is something intrinsically troubling, madly compensatory for a failure to negotiate and coordinate pushing, in knowing through fisting.

The latter term, for the command not-to-do-X, discloses the high moral value of the meaning in the first term the invitation-to do-X: as I have just emphasised. "Can I play with you?" and "Will you play with me" are among the most common utterances of childhood. In some games the children’s bodies are the playthings. One way of side-stepping the anxiety that might be involved is to dramatise the game, a role-play, doctors and nurses. The anxiety is from parental descriptions and injunctions concerning forbidden parts of the body and their actions. Scarlett shows this protest through the ‘dissected’ bits of doll body.

There is a deeply poignant moment in the film Proof when the birth-blind boy is cautioned educatively by his mother that now he is seven he can’t just touch her breasts, even if he can’t see them.

Dirt is not merely matter out-of-place, that is mere untidyness: but threatening matter out-of-place. An infant is taught to see parts of what was inside him/her once it comes outside him/her as dangerous : the shorthand for which is dirty.

In later childhood, s/he is taught to see the parts of the body that produce dirt as intrinsically dirty, and to be hidden, and never shown, and not spoken of. The worst case scenario is when abusive/perverted parents have persuaded a child that the whole of its body is dirty, and that it is the cause that other things (or people) become dirty: and that in fact its being alive is a terrible fault. Such a child must see the world under a shadow it has itself cast. There is a childlike grubbiness to the installation. I seem to remember bits of piss-yellow acetate strewn across parts of the installation. I found this very moving. Seeing this, another of my first thoughts was of its polar opposite, Traherne’s sublime lines about his childhood:

Here is a sad tale, and true – from a documentary. A man who had been blind from birth makes a good adjustment to his sightless life. One day advancing science offers him a sight-restoring operation. When he sees the world for the first time he is deeply upset that it is all so grubby: his other synaesthesias had persuaded him it would be universally clean and straight-lined and beautiful. Unlike the born-sighted he hadn’t learned that beauty is also not-seeing. Are children’s heads filled with more light and hope : do they see grubbiness? Does the installation reflect that truth?

Among the least reported details from the Bolger case of 1993 was that Venables and Thompson, themselves only pre-pubescent children, had inserted batteries up the anus of the tiny boy. I hope it is instantly clear which of the paired concepts above were in play in this tragic instance of failed-play: Still-Moving/Life, Inside-Outside, Soft-Hard, Gusto-Attack, Bidden-Forbidden, Clean-Dirty, Light-Shadow.

The theory says young children have limited ethical sense and don’t/can’t localise the bodily susceptibility to pleasurable touch and stimulation into the genitals and a few other erogenous zones – and so are described as polymorphously perverse. The implication is that non-localisation is a bad thing, away from the norm, perverse. But this capacity is offered as a compliment by Alvin to the eponymous heroine Annie Hall as he is trying to get his first home run.

The ‘proper’ definition of perversion is that of a failure to push together, conceptually as well as sexually. A child who is as yet unable to imagine its body as a sexual body, as a sharable object in the project of sexual sharing, can’t negotiate consent with the pervert who is wilfully seeing it as able to do so. Being children, below the age of moral sense, the ascription of perversion to them is irrelevant. Their total skin-susceptibility is no more perverse than a bird’s a fish’s or a badger’s.

Scarlett is tremendously exciting and interesting for the way it sparked off such a rich array of aesthetic ideas that are anchored in the childhood tasks of maturation: and deeply moving for the sense that most of us fail at those tasks.

I should see the piece again. I hope to do so.

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1: Myself, after Keats : On Chapman’s Homer

2a : Myself, after Wilde’s Lady Bracknell : & T.S Eliot : Ash Wednesday

2b: Don Maclean : American Pie

2c: Bob Dylan : on Like a Rolling Stone

2d: Beatles : She Came in Through… Abbey Road

3a: Bob Dylan : It’s Alright Ma

3b: Bettelhein : The Informed Heart (1960)

3c: Monty Python: The Meaning of Life

4: Wind: Art and Anarchy (1963/85)

5a: Self-Reference : This material will be posted on the site eventually.

5b: Eliot : Four Quartets

6a: Anon: Letter to The Guardian : (Feb 2000)

6b: Plath: Ariel : (1965)

7a: Malan : Individual Psychotherapy & the Science of Pyschodynamics (1995)

7b: Klein : Envy & Gratitude

7c: Justice-joke - various claimants

8a: Freud : Three Essays on Sexuality (1906)

8b : Rochester : Sodom

8c : Burroughs : The Soft Machine (1961)

9: Moorhouse : Proof (1992)

10: Traherne : Third Century.

11: Allen: Annie Hall (1977)