Erotic Fantasy. Hans-Jürgen Döpp
it had, to all intents and purposes, become a popular art. For a long time, Europe ignored Ukiyo-e on the grounds that its content went beyond the boundaries of good taste. It was not until the universal exhibitions in Paris of 1867, 1878 and 1889 that a western audience had the opportunity to rediscover an art form that had hitherto been despised. After that, none would dare deny the major influence of Japanese woodcarving on the entire Impressionist movement.
The English artist Aubrey Beardsley probably possessed the finest collection of Ukiyo-e and shunga. His work, which is so characteristic of the late nineteenth century, is a perfect illustration of the influence of Japanese woodcarving on western art.
27. Images of Spring, coloured shunga, 18th century. Silk on card.
Toulouse-Lautrec also possessed a remarkable collection, a few photographs of which remain. These prints, with their images of cruel and violent ghosts, seem to have particularly affected him, especially the scenes where women are embraced by animals, monkeys, foxes, badgers or vampires. By contrast, in Japan throughout the nineteenth century these prints were hidden and forbidden. As the land of the rising sun became more industrialised, it also became more open to western influences and the Ukiyo-e disappeared into people’s desk drawers. In effect, from the moment when the Meiji emperors seized power in 1868, Japan started flirting with the idea of assimilating into Europe. For this reason, any over-obvious signs of fertility cults or their symbols, especially images of the phallus, were suppressed as they were considered unworthy of a modern nation. The American occupation after the Second World War dealt the final blow to Shintoism. Today, most of the classical shungas which are offered for sale in the West are bought by Japanese collectors who are returning them to their home country in this way.
However, it was not until a massive exhibition of Japanese woodcarvings took place in 1973 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, that the majority of art lovers were given the opportunity of re-learning how to appreciate the true value of these erotic works.
Perhaps today we need to look at these works with new eyes, forgetting that over almost 150 years they served as the languorous representations of our desire for a simple sexuality that rises above all notion of “sin”.
28. Images of Spring, coloured shunga, 18th century. Silk on card.
29. Images of Spring, coloured shunga, 18th century. Silk on card.
In Praise of the Backside
30. Félicien Rops, circa 1890.
Our Arses Shall Be Symbols of Peace
Behind-thoughts[30] on the realm of the moons of flesh
The arse is the proletariat of body parts. It is condemned to namelessness; we search the dictionaries in vain for suitable expressions. At most, the common or vulgar expression serves as a term of abuse. The gesture of showing the bare behind is interpreted as obscene and shocking. Sometimes it is the despised location where punishment is administered. Its presence is characterised by passivity. The work ethic internalised in bourgeois society places passivity, indolence and inactivity under a taboo from the aesthetic point of view as well. Thus the posterior has become an obscene part of the body, especially when its indolence is emphasised by the growth of adipose tissue.[31] The rear-end represents worthlessness within the framework of the body; it is held to be the most soulless part of the body and thus has every reason to groan sometimes, deeply and wordlessly.
Idealistic aesthetic theory, with its reservations about anything that “resembles bestial ugliness” (Rosenkranz), banished the bottom from the repertoire of beautiful objects worthy of representation. It is a physical representation of the opposition between spirit and matter. Where the spirit strives upward, its gravity drags us down. In his work, The Nude, (1958), Kenneth Clark analyses the classical conception of physical beauty. “Nothing which bears any relationship to the human being as a whole was removed or ignored.” So the proportions of the body are discussed, the moulding of the stomach, the rounding of the hips, the play of muscles in the arms and legs, but not the posterior – as if it were not part of the whole.
In every respect the arse is the symbol of everything offensive. This verdict on the anal region is yet more effective and far-reaching since, from infancy onwards, it is linked with the experience of sexual pleasure. Lou Andreas-Salomé[32] argued that the first prohibition a child encounters is against taking pleasure in the products of the anal region. This prohibition is decisive for his or her entire future development. Freud explains; “It is in this context that the infant must first become aware of an environment hostile to its instinctive drives, must learn to separate its own being from this other, and then perform the first ‘displacement’ of its outlets for pleasure.” From infancy onwards, the anal region remains the symbol of everything worthless, everything that must be separated from life.
Bourgeois aesthetics and the libidinous destiny of anality converge in one concept; “disgust”. It is precisely the tabooing of the bottom, however, that gives its exposure a sense of potential anti-bourgeois protest. There have been many reports throughout the twentieth century of young women and girls baring their bottoms in public – provocatively, boastfully, ostentatiously. Towards the end of the 1950s, there was talk of a new phenomenon – “mooning” by entire groups of young men. By the 1970s, this was increasingly the case among young women as well. Hans-Peter Dürr[33] has indicated that this was a provocative act of rule-breaking. The taboo, which continued to exist under the concept of modesty, was deliberately broken by anal exhibitionism.
31. Berthomme de Saint-André, 1927.
32. Reunier (pseudonym of Breuer-Courth), 1925.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already written about the pleasures of anal exhibitionism. In his Confessions, he informs us that when he was about eighteen years old – round about 1730, therefore – he used to look for “dark alleys and remote spots where I would show myself at a distance to young women in the posture I really wished to adopt close to them. What they saw was not the obscene member – I never ever thought of that – but its reverse, the ridiculous. The silly pleasure I took in mooning in front of them is indescribable. I really only needed to take another step further in order to experience the treatment I longed for, since I had no doubt that one or other more resolute girl would have done it to me in passing if I had had the courage to wait.” Did he want to be spanked on his bottom? In any case, according to his own estimation, he gave the girls “more of a ridiculous sight than a seductive one. The cleverest pretended not to notice; others shrieked with laughter, while others took offence and made a fuss.”
In spite of disgust and shame, people retain their fascination with this part of the body, with its functions and products – even, and especially, when they campaign against “obscenity”. A secret, displaced pleasure can always be detected under cover of disgust.
We know of the twenty-one-year-old Mozart’s letters to “Bäsele”, presumably his first lover. In these, he celebrates scatological verbal orgies in a boisterous, almost infantile manner; this is probably the reason these letters were unpublished for so long. Untamed pleasure in anality ignites a verbal faecal-firework display. On 13 November, 1777, he wrote from Mannheim; “I’m sorry about the bad handwriting, my pen is already old. Soon it will be twenty-two years that I have been shitting out of the same hole, and it’s still not torn! – and I’ve shat so often…” On 28 February he writes; “I just did a big fart! Our arses should be the signs of peace. Shit! – Shit! O sweet word![34]“
Anal eroticism seems to be an indisputable
This is a pun in German too. (Translator’s note).
i. e. when it is very fat. (Translator’s note).
12. Feb. 1862–5 Feb 1937; writer of theoretical papers on psychoanalysis.
Physicist, born 7. Oct. 1929; Alternative Nobel Prize Winner, 1987.
The rest of this quote is obscene/nonsense rhymes in German; untranslatable since they are words, or phonemes, which rhyme with DRECK. (Translator’s note.).