AESTHETICS AND CONFINEMENT
Bookish
AESTHETICS AND CONFINEMENT
Confinement is often thought of as restraint, a forced, necessary, or inherent form of restriction largely imposed by an outside entity. Its roots are linked to the 16th-century French confiner meaning "to border; to shut up, enclose,” and also to the Medieval Latin confinare, or "border on; set bounds." Thinking of confinement as the latter, as a border or boundary that we might have the ability to self-impose or destroy, offers greater agency, control, and potential.
Near the end of Susan Sontag’s Duet for Cannibals, there’s a scene that shows Dr. Arthur Bauer (Lars Ekborg) and his wife Francesca (Adriana Asti) in bed, their housekeeper Ingrid (Agneta Ekmanner) sandwiched between them. The trio fills the entirety of the frame, and as the camera zooms out to close the claustrophobic encounter, we see Francesca turn off the lamp before reaching over to embrace Bauer. Both then descend atop the restricted Ingrid as the light dims. Often the representative image for reviews of the film, the scene is one of many uncomfortable moments in Sontag’s strange directorial debut that follows the three, along with Tomas (Gösta Ekman), on a series of mind-games that perpetually launch into a state of confusion. Was that real? An illusion? Where is the line between the two?
The scene also epitomizes the sense of confinement that pervades the film. Bauer, a German Marxist revolutionary in semi-retirement, hires Tomas to catalog his work, but as part of the employment agreement, Tomas must leave the apartment he shares with long-time girlfriend Ingrid and move in with the Bauers. What ensues is bizarre behavior and unreasonable expectations as the older couple toys with the younger, and the former’s capriciousness tends to be the primary driver. Duet for Cannibals “deals with power as an absolute,” Molly Haskell wrote for The Village Voice when the film was released in 1969. “The characters are not interpretable, analyzable, three-dimensional, but are functions of power as a naked energy.”
Confinement is often thought of as restraint, a forced, necessary, or inherent form of restriction largely imposed by an outside entity. Its roots are linked to the 16th-century French confiner meaning "to border; to shut up, enclose,” and also to the Medieval Latin confinare, or "border on; set bounds." Thinking of confinement as the latter, as a border or boundary that we might have the ability to self-impose or destroy, offers greater agency, control, and potential.
While entrapping her characters, Sontag never gives Duet for Cannibals over to interpretation, instead cordoning it off into its enigmatic and mystifying box. The film is difficult to parse and like her other work, has garnered plenty of debate. As Jesse Cataldo states, “the sort of theorizing that Duet for Cannibals demands is bound to inevitably draw inquisitive viewers toward the type of analytical over-examination that Sontag railed against.” With the film, Sontag experiments with what it means to make art within the confines of “Against Interpretation,” perhaps her most well-known essay arguing for a more sensual approach to criticism. These restrictions surely delimited her aesthetics, though they also garner space to see “how it is what it is, even that it is what it is.” In this case, confining oneself is the key to aesthetic liberty.
Confinement, of course, is not limited to the aesthetic or intellectual. Artist Françoise Gilot is widely known for her decades-long relationship with Pablo Picasso and is a chic cultural figure in her own right. In her memoir that doubles as a truncated biography of the famed painter, Gilot recounts this tumultuous, passionate period of her life as Picasso’s muse and mother of two of his children. She’s clear-eyed and unemotional, and with the assistance of journalist Carlton Lake, writes Life with Picasso with a distance that evokes an in-depth piece of reporting. The text vividly describes Picasso’s overbearing, manipulative, and at times cruel treatment of Gilot and his increasingly tight grip on her life as he demands more of her attention solely for his artistic and emotional benefit. It’s simple enough to see how a much younger woman could become enmeshed in Picasso’s life (he was 40 years older and already a successful artist when they met), and yet, the two form a sort of partnership, one that contorts, constricts, and eventually, dissolves.
Gilot is a commanding figure and doesn’t make excuses for her ex-lover’s poor behavior or his desire to contain her. Describing an incident early in their relationship, she says, “He had the idea that if someone is precious to you, you must keep her for yourself alone, because all the accidental contacts she might have with the outside world would somehow tarnish her and, to a degree, spoil her for you.” This sentiment—particularly the glaring “accidental” that implies a person would not and should not desire to foster her own social circle outside of romance— collides with Gilot’s independence and resolute nature. For her, the relationship becomes “a challenge I could not turn down.”
Coupled with her assertions, reviews of Gilot’s memoir are nearly unanimous in professing her strength and choice, which hinges, in part, on her ability to establish and maintain the division between herself and Picasso. Unlike in his portraits of other lovers like Dora Maar or Marie-Therese Walter, Picasso never was able to fully capture, or confine, Gilot. “My portraits are not boxes in which I fit. I'm not a prisoner of them,” she said in a 1996 interview. “I felt entirely free and independent of his portraits. I did not define myself by them, put myself inside them.” We might instead find Gilot within her own self-portraits, in an elegantly straightforward graphite drawing or “Portrait in Black,” which depicts the artist at her easel, paintbrush poised.
For most of us as for Gilot, evading the power that confines us to predetermined roles is difficult. “To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed,” Olivia Laing writes in Everybody. “We’re all stuck in our bodies.”
Agnes Martin attempted to free herself from such bodily cultural impositions. She relocated from New York to a remote area of New Mexico in 1967 during a time when her homosexuality would have officially been determined a sickness. For Martin, this retreat into a home so secluded that reaching the nearest town required a twenty-mile drive was a form of setting boundaries that garnered an incredible amount of solitude and liberty. She describes renouncing her former life and the material world in “The Untroubled Mind,” a long essay that refuses the typical structure of the form. She writes, “Painting is not about ideas or personal emotion. When I was painting in New York I was not so clear about that. Now I’m very clear that the object is freedom.”
Martin’s grids exemplify this relationship between freedom and confinement. Through thin horizontal lines or rectangular patterns in gold leaf, the paintings are both precise in individual elements and vast as a whole, with strokes running to the edges as if they could extend endlessly. Part of the intrigue of Martin’s lines lies in both their connectedness and ability to define an area, to enclose negative space, where we might see, as Laing writes, “two things at once, a door onto empty space and a mesh or cage.” For Martin, as for Sontag, confining herself was essential to achieving a larger aesthetic goal.
Ironically, though, Martin saw her works with all of their potential for entrapment as the opposite, telling artist Ann Wilson in 1966, “My paintings are about merging, about formlessness. A world without objects, without interruption.” Within confinement, she found freedom.
Written by Grace Ebert
Continue Reading
