Queering the Pitch

Been doing some film editing lately. Watching HDTV, too, which sometimes exposes editors’ having gambled on a long shot being long enough that no one – at least at standard def – would notice that the actors’ lip movements don’t in the least correspond to the words on the soundtrack. Michel Chion says we want to marry voices to their sources, to see mouths. In this respect the tricks of facial orientation filmmakers use so that any words can be synched to an image track are a bit like the rhetoric of Nuts magazine cover photography, whereby breasts are angled or draped so that the nipples remain just out of sight, as if they were something impossible and fantastic. These images are meant to inspire in viewers a desire to warp the image plane or rearrange the body so that the hidden secret would be visible - a desire that, as Linda Williams notes, porn panders to by contorting performers according not to comfort or verisimilitude but a logic of ‘maximum visibility’ (Hardcore 48).

Increasingly, cheesecake photos employ Photoshop not merely to smooth over blemishes or reproportion bodies but to combine, Zeuxis-style, elements from multiple photos, a process that is often taken to the point of defying conventional anatomy. Synthetic cubism is one reference point, but I was also reminded of these bodies in the Tate’s recent Gaugin show. One of the nice thinks about showing his carvings and ceramics alongside the paintings is that you realise the latter look not merely spatially ‘off’ but as if pictorial space was a sort of resistant material with its own obstinate grain or torque, only partially malleable into the forms Gaugin wants it to assume.

As the earliest artist yet to be exhibited at Tate II, part of the show’s remit was to argue for Gaugin’s importance to later, modern-er art. Certainly, the extent to which he allows desire to deform virtual space marks him as an ancestor of recent painters (Kilimnick, Joffe, Peyton et al) who’ve sought to reproduce the dissipated or decadent styles of attention characteristic of fan art – in which ‘good bits’ might be larger or more worked up while blurrings or disconnections, lapses in concentration and spots of boredom, sully other parts of the image/experience.

Those works (that is, both the fans’ stuff and that of the painters reflexively cribbing their style) tend, of course, to be based on prior images that, translated through fans’ desiring, variably co-ordinated or skilled bodies, come out distorted, sometimes unrecognizably. At the same moment as Gaugin was sailing to the tropics Michael Field (the alias of ‘poets & lovers’ Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) was working on Sight & Song, a poetic ‘translation’ of some of the pair’s favourite paintings. According to Ana Parejo Vadillo the collection operates according to a ‘two-phased aesthetic’ (Passengers of Modernity 192): the poems offer ‘objective’ descriptions of the images before submitting them to subjective, often sexualized re-readings. What Vadillo doesn’t comment on is the frequency with which these re-readings involve recalibrating the spatial relationships between the bodies that the pictures represent.

Often these shifts seem dictated by the poets’ own ‘orientation’ in gender/sexuality terms: a couple of the poems (including one on Boticelli’s Primavera, of which Gaugin’s Nave Nave Mahana migh be read as a softcore remake) position us within the pictorial space occupied by female models, so that left and right are reversed (or ‘inverted’ – as Victorians said of homosexuals). Others trace sightlines that put female bodies squarely in the way of female eyes – eyes that, cued by Field, it is easy to read as harbouring an other-than-Platonic intent.

Of course, I’m probably doing unto Field what they’ve done unto Tintoretto, Giorgione et al: warping the original in the hope of teasing out a latent sexual secret. Nonetheless, their ‘two-phase’ translations of 2D canvases into space of utopian possbility remains intriguing as an instance of viewers interacting with and realigning images and bodies in order to realise multiple, competing storylines.

It might seem fanciful or trite to compare this to the process of playing a videogame, but I think its legitimate – especially in the case of games like Fez or Paper Mario, where progress often entails a form of perceptual ‘frame-shifting’, a switch between reading forms as 2D or 3D – just as, by imagining the males in Tintoretto's The Rescue occupy a different picture plane, we can choose to see the newly-liberated female captive gazing not at her (male) emancipator but at the body of the woman in the centre of the boat.

This game is a bit like looking at the duckrabbit, the famous emblem of epistemological relativism that can be seen either as a quacking duck or a windblown bunny, but not as both simultaneously (see also those images of preening coquetttes who turn into beshawled and decrepit crones). Re-reading the bit in Proust where Charlus is introduced for an upcoming book group, I was struck by the idea that there might be readers who wouldn’t yet know about the character’s (or, for that matter, the author’s) sexual orientation. Could you read (what now seemed to be) such an absurdly innuendo-saturated account of the character and come out of it blithely convinced he was straight?

Both Fez and Paper Mario have cartoony visual styles that riff on the videogame's transition from sprites to polygons, speaking to an audience old enough to have had to use their imaginations to ‘fill out’ games’ pixel-flat worlds. But there’s no reason games with similar mechanics couldn’t adopt entirely different aesthetics or communicate other messages.

The photographer Matt Stuart takes pictures that (a bit like the Elstir paintings Proust describes, also in vol. II) are angled so as to produce bizarre trompe l’oeil conjunctions. While I don’t really like his images (I’m turned of by the way they render the world wondrous and then knowable, dazzling their viewers by transforming ‘everyday’ London into a spectacular space rich with human variety, romance and humour and then flattering them by allowing them to decode and master this initially puzzling plurality) they are, in a way, games and suggestive as such of the potential for forms of visual play based on opening contingent arrangements of forms and bodies onto new meanings.