The Bad Art Cafe

A Perverse Peter Pan, a look at Scott Heim's novel Mysterious Skin

Perverse: Directed away from what is right or good
Peter Pan:a storybook boy who could fly and never wanted to grow up.

“His eyebrows met ominously in his forehead’s middle. Up close, I could smell him. The odor swelled, like something hot. If I weren’t so eager to touch him again, I would have shrunk from it. . . . ‘But you’re a tough queer, right?’”
-Wendy Peterson to Neil McCormick, Mysterious Skin

“Edie was looking for an alternative. Andy Warhol was a kind of alternative convention. . . .Edie felt a strong sexual relationship to our father. But was impossible. The same thing was true with Warhol. It was impossible. He was androgynous, as Edie herself was. [Warhol was] A kind of perverse Peter Pan.” Saucie Sedgwick on Edie, her underground movie star sister.

Ultra Violet

It wasn’t easy being a French bourgeois one day, and the girl in “Andy Warhol’s soup” the next, but Ultra Violet, at an age when everyone else was home with the kiddies and a rich husband, was out on the town looking for publicity of her status as a newly reborn underground movie star, c. 1966. She came by the Factory one day, and ended up in the movies, like so many others.

But Ultra wanted to stand out. She shed her bourgeois ways, at least when she was out with the factory people. She poured cranberry juice in her hair to color it, but beets in her purse to rough her lips and cheeks, and vintage torn purple dresses for shots and out on the town. Formally, she was a high society belle in white mink stoles, and elaborate hair pieces. Sometimes, as Isabelle, the French society girl, she’d be at dinner and hear tales of her other persona, Ultra Violet. No body realized they were talking to the same woman. With Andy, she was a wild child woman of a “certain age”, and her long tongue, is photographed coming out of her mouth like a gigantic snake. She took a certain pride in it. Andy thought she looked like Vivien Leigh, and according to him in POPISM, Ultra was popular with the press because, “ she had an intellectual mini-rap about the importance of underground films.”

Greedy Girl

Greedy Girl (“La Goulue”) was the nickname of a dancer made famous by a painter from the aristocratic family who had short legs. The painter who loved his prostitutes and café singers and dance hall dancers: Toulouse-Lautrec .

Greedy Girl, whose real name was Louise Weber, was former laundress (like Trilby) who became a famous dance hall dancer at the Moulin Rouge, Paris, c. early 1890’s.

Bursting into the Moulin Rouge in one Lautrec’s most famous paintings, “La Goulue enters the Moulin Rouge with Two Women” (1892), we see the dance star as a movie star in an extreme – to her waist – low cut v neck gown. There’s a superior expression of the famous twisted on her lips. The women with her arm and arm are totally besides the point.

Greedy Girl was nicknamed this because of her habit of draining other people’s glasses of liquor. She later grew too fat to dance the can-can, and lost her job as a dancer.

Accented red lips, lurid light green gown, patches of solid blue background color this painting.

Tracing Butterflies

It’s a blank background of mostly a white wall, and a little bit of black floor showing at the bottom. The nude figure photographed has her back to the viewer and her face is scratched out. She has long course, unkempt hair, and a pear shaped rear end. She holds the wall on one side with her hand to balance the motion she ‘s making with her other hand.

Gia

Gia Marie Carangi (1960 –1986) was a fashion model for all times. She was the favorite of many an art photographer; Chris von Weigenheim, who crossed over the line from fashion to art, for one. Gia was a brunette when all other models were blond. big breasted, a lesbian, and tragically a heroin addict. Her bio, Thing of Beauty by Stephen Fried reads like one long question, which came first, the model’s life or the needle?

Her career in New York City lasted only from ages 18 – 22, but her beauty became such a standard that even when she worked high, she was great. The camera loved her, all the more when she embraced the life of a drug addict from the shooting galleries on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She photographed, haunted, temporal, ethereal, like a Nineteenth Century painter’s suicidal Pre-Raphelite model or a dying young courtesan.

One picture of her appears on her come back model card from Elite, (1981). Gia’s perfect, classical features, huge brown eyes, and the magic she could create for the camera, effortlessly, were all present, but her soul is on her face, and there’s a breakdown tragedy look in her eyes, (outlined in light blue shimmer eye shadow, very modern), even scarier than any of her pictures that appeared with the track marks in her elbow.

The phrase "heroin chic" wasn't coined about Gia, but about the models who came around 10 years later who all had that romantic strung-out look of a beauitful fashion model junkie. Models were told to shoot up inside their mouths or under their toenails after Gia's time.

2 Sisters

An old black & white picture of my own personal collection. 2 bourgeois sisters in a dramatically different pose. It is wintertime in New York City, c. 1926 and my mother and her sister – Cissy & Tish, respectively, are wearing the most precious matching wool and fur trimmed coats, and little stocking caps. The photographer has posed them on a little perch, and my mother, age 5, holds hands with her older sister, age 6. Tish leans into her little sister, and both are wearing smiles, little faint, little girl smiles, that reflect the closeness they will have with each other their entire lives.

(2/15/04 would have been Mom’s 83rd birthday – the day after Valentine’s Day)

“and who’s the shy pornographer?”

Do you ever feel like getting stoned while you hang around your loft with a Polaroid camera and take some leather sex nude shots of yourself? Tie up your considerably ample penis and testicles in leather strips and somehow figure out a way to get the timed shutter of the camera (sitting on it’s tripod) to go off while you thrusted your body parts into the camera in a perfectly composed autoportrait? A Polaroid shot that develops itself?

Polaroid pictures are the first attempt at photography for artist Robert Mapplethorpe in 1973. He was a painter, sculptor, assemblage artist, but he has now become a photographer. Published in book form from a few years ago, Autoportraits is a huge selection of these first photos by the man known for his artwork of oversized male appendages.

It is nice to see that long before Robert recruits his male models on the run from the U.S. Navy, (he meets them in late night bars, chases them out the door, corners them with a business card, and gets them to take their clothes off for the camera later that evening after buying them breakfast at the IHOP), he himself poses in many compromising positions.

Supposedly, these pictures led to an introduction to Sam Wagstaff, millionaire art collector, who picked up Robert with the line: “and who’s the shy pornographer?”

The Work Speaks for Itself

Patricia Bosworth, biographer of Diane Arbus, published in 1984, first met the photographer as a model in the 1950's when Allen and Diane Arbus were husband and wife collaborators as fashion photographers. Most people like to forget that Arbus actually came from a fashion empire (her father and grandfatherwere furriers and owned a huge 8 floor department store in New York). Allen and Diane worked together until one day late in the fifties, she became so depressed that she walked away from it all.

Patricia was John Robert Powers model, and was wearing falsies, crinolines, a waist-cincher, and pancake make-up the day she arrived at Arbus's studio for her first big photo shoot as an eighteen year old fashion model. Diane greeted her at the door in barefoot and pulled her into the studio, "oh good, you don't look like a model, that's why we hired you," she told Patricia.

Years later when Bosworth became a journalist, she would often run into the little woman with intense eyes who was completely absorbed in what you were saying. Once Diane told Bosworth she had just won a Guggenheim that paid her to photograph a beauty contest at a nudist camp.

When Bosworth started to work on Arbus's biography, she was told by Doon Arbus, Allen and Diane's oldest daughter that she could not contribute to any biography that touched on her mother's life - "that the work speaks for itself."

Storyville Portrait

Meanwhile, in same coffee table art book, the American Art Book, on page 37 appears another kind of stylized beautiful woman in photographic protrait from 1912. She's a light skinbeauty, with glossy black hair, a soft, curveous hourglass figure, and unlike most portraitsof ladies from her day, she is not dressed up in the coseted gown and big hat of the time. Rather, she is dressed down in her chemise that barely covers her upper theighs and is wearing black stockings over her knees.

It is called "Storyville Portrait" by once obscured art photographer E.J. Bellocq. The woman portrayed is a commen New Orleans red light district Storyville brothel prostitute and is in a room, in front of a door, that more or less looks like a fake house with a fake loving wife.

The photographes were lost until the 1960's when they were discovered and published. The story of the photographer's life became a movie called Pretty Baby in 1978.

Models

Besides being a prodigious diary writer, and literary person in Paris in the ‘30’s, Anais Nin spent part of her teenage life in America being an artist’s model. When she sat down to write some dirty fictional stories to make money many years later, her experience as a model served her well. One encounter after another is chronicled in her short stories, called Delta of Venus, and Little Birds.

There is very little plot line, basically the short story “Model” in Little Birds tells of how a 16 year old girl decides to model, even though her mother forbids it. There are sound reasons why a mother of a 16 year old attractive girl in the teens would forbid working with artists. They had a reputation, to say the least. The unnamed character is hit on by all her artists, and even if they do not lay a finger on her, they figure out a way to get her “going”. As the artist who put her on a horse dummy that can trot while she poses in the nude for him, for one . . . also the guy who keeps her at the artist colony for a few extended days . . .