Plagiarism By Anticipation: Like The Real Thing?

This morning I woke up to this: what an attachment – a false vagina. Makes a difference from all that Viagra. The strangest of attachments - strangely familiar: a real attachable attachment. Not the real thing, but like the real thing.

The email came in response to my ‘Picture Inspired by a Panda’ (23/5/2010). “Did you invent this? Or was it the other way round? Was your picture of a rider really inspired by a panda? It looks to me more like it was inspired by this - ‘like the real thing’ - vagina, the correspondent (and fellow Pataphysician) wondered. And being a disciple of Duchamp (how could he be my friend if he wasn’t?), he also included a quote from the great cigar smoker: “I want to make art to grasp the mind the way the penis is grasped by the vagina”.

Like The Real Thing, there’s a thing! No, I’m not the patentee of a pump-up vagina; what we’ve got here is a case of what Raymond Queneau coined as ‘plagiarism by anticipation’. Or to put it another way – given the horsiness of my original subject matter – ‘putting the horse before the tart’ (and I use the word original advisedly). But it’s wonderfully liberating to find possibilities in your work that often exceed those you anticipated. When a photograph that had been taken was found to have been taken before, the previous attempt could be called ‘plagiarism by anticipation’.

But which came first, the horse, or the tart (the panda inspiration, or the pump inflation)? I ask because the photograph was published in a book called 'Mrs Sharpe's Cracks', and a few years ago I came across a battered copy, in a secondhand bookshop in Earlsfield. Flicking through it I found someone had traced the jodhpurs and riding apparatus in the photograph we've been discussing: ironically, I'd traced a copy of my own book only to find one of my pictures had been copied! I bought my own book. To think, the image could exist – on some bedroom wall - as an original painting? Who knows, it’s conceivable that the tracing could have been used as the template for a sex toy? 'The real thing' would take on a whole (hole) new meaning. I hope not. I don’t think art should be stimulating.    

  

    
    

The Butterfly Effect (from behind)

Yesterday, from the tube - the District line - where the train runs over-ground near Wimbledon Park - I spotted a man in his back garden, kick his dog. A Dalmatian. At first-sight - from the rattling train – I didn’t see it right; a foot connecting with a blur of black and white: I think: he’s kicking a football. The sign adjacent to the emergency button (in the carriage) said: ‘penalty for improper use’. Was reporting a dog being used as a football, worth the risk of a penalty?

I hit the emergency button on the London to Dover train a couple of weeks ago. I was in the toilet and I always flush train-toilets with my foot… sort of kick it. But as I'm poised on one leg, about to flush, the train rocks (points?) and I fall onto the help button. Next thing, a voice comes from a concealed speaker, “This is the driver. Do you need assistance?”

‘To make a work of art that doesn’t look like a work of art’: the lines (tracks, designs?) on First Great Western’s train seats are very Duchampian. Do they record the contours of the journey? I’m thinking of Duchamp’s “Three Standard Stoppages”, whilst, with my toe, tracing the line I’m taking - through time (a timeline?). Back to the dog-kick: to be affected but feel unable to effect a change. A family once lived in a shoe. I live life in a sock - a sock the size of a body bag. Permanently 'socked' - always on the hop - another skin between your own skin and everything. How do you kick a sock that size, off?

This morning I drew the curtains to see the biggest butterfly I’d ever set eyes on - gigantic, on the grass beneath the tree in the garden - its bright-coloured markings comprehending the sunlight; I ran for my camera: I’m an artist but I love to connect with my amateur-side. And what barmaid’s arm wouldn’t benefit from a papillon tattoo? I can make a tracing from the photo (there’s this tattooist on the Fulham Road…)

I’ve got a chime hanging in my window; some days it looks like a UFO but today it’s more like a halo. As I’m framing the butterfly through the halo the boy who lives next door runs out into his garden, kicking a football around. The noise and vibration of the ball ricocheting off the garden fence seems to have no effect on the butterfly, it doesn’t flap a wing. I zoom in.

It is indeed the biggest butterfly in the world. I’ve discovered a new species: and when you do that you can call it after something; name it after yourself even. I’m not dressed yet, so I put on my brightest coloured socks - (attractive socks?) and social worker sandals - in the hope of attracting the enormous creature onto the end of my foot. Not to kick it: for a close-up shot.

But when I am up (down) close, when I’m analysing it like a social worker, the butterfly says: Brazil; Portugal; Tunisia; Mexico; Korea; England – 2006. This butterfly didn’t shed its caterpillar skin; this papillion’s a species of dog-eaten football (‘The Shot-Spotted Butterball’?). So I can kick it after all.

I collapse near Dover whilst kicking a toilet, causing a man to kick a dog near Wimbledon Park, causing a dog in Putney to chew a football to death, causing a butterfly to be born of the dead skin: The Butterfly Effect (in action, von hinten)? 

Shespy Ibuy: The Personal Shopper

No wife, no kids, and no degree in Golf Course Management. No milk, no eggs, no cheese, no fish, no mermaids, no meat, and no alcohol: but I’ve got a personal shopper.

Pre Shespy Ibuy

She spy’s it, I try it. I buy it. Shespy Ibuy sound’s Oriental: but she’s no Kato to my Clouseau.  Who else could give me, ‘Conversations with Cage’, and then have me in Car Coat? I don’t have a car. She introduced me to the ‘Sebald family’ (all shoes, all sizes); Terence Conran’s son’s spectacles; Duchamp’s ‘Notes on the Large Glass’ (I already knew about his Urinal)… and she bought me a wonderful sea-green toilet seat from Lidl – totally unexpected. She was pivotal in Basel, when I couldn’t decide on the right colour of lorry tarpaulin for my Freitag shoulder bag. I could go on…Celio clothes, Hero phones – there’s poetry in the brand names - raw cameras, and a Bikers’ leather jacket, lined with skull and crossbones (I don’t have a motorbike).

Post Shespy Ibuy

And we never set out to shop: we never go ‘out shopping’. It just sort of happens naturally - on the way to something or somewhere – between places. What I’m saying is: it’s never planned. Occasionally we come together in spontaneous consumerism. Quite often she’ll want something, so I’ll want it as well. Take Designer radiators: we were talking radiators on the phone late into the night recently. She was talking, heating - naming names: The Big One, Anaconda and Ron. Go on, Google them. I did, as she pronounced their names: sculpted pipe-work that’ll get your own pipes gushing! But this doesn’t mean we want the same things. She’s after a leather bed; left to myself I’d be in leather trousers. Shespy Ibuy don’t always see eye to eye. 

Pre Shespy Ibuy

But say I lost my job? No money: no more Shespy Ibuy. And I’d have time on my hands. I could volunteer to man in-store security cameras in all the shops we frequented: I’d Ispy Shespy. But how would I feel if I saw her personal shopping with another? Drawing the curtains of a changing room on another? 

Pictures by Lucinda Wells (who informs me, is a mermaid after all)

Doorknobs and Duchamps

Believe it or not an adjoining door – an orifice - connects Marcel Duchamp and Larry Grayson. As we all know, Grayson’s catchphrase was “shut that door” - you can still ‘get it’ on vinyl and DVD; Duchamp too relished wordplay - enjoyed nothing more than a good pun (the night he died, he was reading Alphonse Allais). Duchamp believed naming something transforms it – and would have appreciated Grayson’s wordplay and role-play; both men punned, both camped-it-up, both men played with our perception of doors (doors of perception?).

But first, consider Duchamp’s appropriation of the Mona Lisa (1919). He gave her a beard, moustache (convincingly turning her into a man) and added the inscription L.A.O.O.Q. (pronounced in French as Elle a chaud au cul, ‘she has hot ass’): Grayson would been 'at home' with Duchamp, as Duchamp too had something to say about the opening and shutting of doors.

Much of Duchamp’s oeuvre illustrates the reconciliation of opposites – of contradictory or opposing entities – and perhaps the clearest example of this can be seen in a work simply known as Door: 11 rue Larrey, a fully functioning door Duchamp designed to connect two rooms in the tiny apartment he’d recently moved into in 1927 on the rue Larrey in Paris. This door was located in the corner of the main living area, positioned in such a way as to close the entrance either to the bedroom or the bathroom, but not both at the same time! Duchamp’s Door functions in opposition to the axiom implicit in the common adage “a door must be open or closed”; so if Larry Grayson had found himself in Duchamp’s cramped apartment on 11 rue Larrey, he may well have felt at home, but he couldn’t have “shut that door”.

So where are we? Larry Grayson minces down the rue Larrey, meets Duchamp and is lost for words – can’t “shut that door”; but as one door fails to close, another opens and we’re back outside on the street: Danny La Rue, remember him? After working in a fashion store in Exeter and a stint in the Navy Danny La Rue (1927-2009) had a glittering and glamorous career as one of the most popular and prolific entertainers Britain has ever known; La Rue entertained the Queen, looking like a Queen. In his legendary drag-act La Rue impersonated such diverse female icons as Marlene Deitrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Margret Thatcher. Bob Hope described him as “the most glamorous woman in the world” But clearly, Bob Hope never met Rose Selavy, Marcel Duchamp's alter ego; Rose Selavy (a reconciliation of opposing sexual identities).

A portrait of Duchamp, done-up as Rose Selavy, appeared on a perfume bottle, Belle Haleine, eau de voilette (Beautiful Breath: Veil Water) in 1921. But Duchamp couldn’t have had beautiful breath: he, like me, puffed cigars. But even something as macho, phallic and poking-out as a cigar, can be reconciled (as famine) by a puff.

Strange Days Indeed

Got up, pulled-up, inhaled some white powder and photographed my nose. Yesterday, I had an out-of-focused nose (see: “On Powdering Your Nose”, 31/10/09). So this morning I straightened things out – I need to be focused.

Then I went out. But I didn’t even make it to the end of the road: Look at this.

Last night was Halloween.

It’s Sunday, so I fall onto my daybed with the papers. I look at this.

I’m going to bed early; Harry Houdini’s got me gripped (Brandon R, “The Life And Many Deaths Of Harry Houdini, Secker & Warburg, London, 1993). Houdini was a man of many obsessions. He specialised in death-defying escapes (for which his name became a byword); but what was Houdini really trying to escape from?

As for myself, I’ve spent the whole day trapped in yesterday’s blog – caught in its web. When I close my eyes I see my powdered nasal hair tangled up in the hedge. I'm even thinking of going back out and rearranging the Halloween decorations in my neighbour's hedge; in such a way that they mimic the peaks and troughs of the graph on the Business pages. AND ON THE SAME PAGE THERE'S A BUSINESSMAN PULLING - DOING PULL-UPS IN THE PAPER!

It’s been a funny Halloween and it’s getting even stranger. Houdini waged a long campaign against fake mediums (he fell out badly with his one-time-friend Arthur Conan-Doyle, a staunch believer in spiritualism). Houdini would often attend séances dressed in a “medium-trapping disguise”. I’m looking at a photograph of him wearing it; he looks more like Stanley Spencer, minus the pram. Here’s another image from the Houdini book. It shows ectoplasm emerging from a spiritualist’s nose. But this variety bears a remarkable resemblance to knitting wool (Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo’s was a dedicated knitter – he’d been keenly ‘casting off’ since boyhood.

No, I’m going to read some Duchamp instead. Oh no! All that dust breading on “The Large Glass” (dust preserved in Man Ray's photograph, 1921). And the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition, which opened on October 14, 1942 at the Whitelaw Reid Mansion in midtown Manhattan, was both historic and peculiar. Duchamp had festooned the primary exhibition space (floor to ceiling) with a tangled web of sixteen miles of string!

At the show’s opening children ran around and played catch and some of the painters became annoyed because nobody could get to see the paintings.