By Steve Finbow.
Stewart Home, Art School Orgy, (New Reality Records, 2023)
“But take heed, it is not a matter of the deepening of a drive; what is involved is an orgy of realism, an orgy of production. A rage (perhaps also a drive, but one that substitutes itself for all the others) to summon everything before the jurisdiction of signs. Let everything be rendered in the light of the sign, in the light of a visible energy. Let all speech be liberated and proclaim desire. We are reveling, in this liberalization, which, in fact, simply marks the growing progress of obscenity. All that is hidden and still enjoys a forbidden status, will be unearthed, rendered to speech and made to bow before the facts. The real is growing ever larger, some day the entire universe will be real, and when the real is universal, there will be death,” writes Jean Baudrillard in Seduction.
Art School Orgy is the latest in Stewart Home’s fictional orgy of production, which includes titles such as Come Before Christ and Murder Love, Blow Job, Cunt, Whips and Furs: My Life as a Bon Vivant, Gambler and Love Rat ‘by’ Jesus H. Christ, 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess, and Tainted Love. This time, the novel is set in the Republican College of Art (a veiled literary flip of the Royal College of Art) in the early 1960s, with David Hockney as the main protagonist, and R. B. Kitaj, Peter Blake and Pauline Boty among the supporting cast; so far, so David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury. But this is Stewart Home remember, so — as in his Mandy, Charlie and Mary-Jane — Home reverses the polarity of the narrative, undermines the structure, rewrites cultural history in a collage of facts, pornography, simulations, sadomasochism, appropriation, political satire and jokes.
In Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, Baudrillard responds to a question about Hockney’s coeval — Andy Warhol: “Let’s say that Warhol is for me the most evident and modern illustration of Duchamp’s slogan, which is very much the epitaph of all contemporary art: ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even’. Warhol is art stripped bare by anti-art even. It’s an aesthetic orgy, but a destructive orgy, drawing its irony from the object itself, from the banal extravaganza of the commodity. He will have made of art a serial and banal dimension, but he succeeded in extorting from this seriality and banality a genial element of shock, surprise and prodigality. He has made a paradoxical leap. The others, his successors, have only succeeded in making of banality a new sentimental aesthetic (like the bourgeoisie has made of advertising, according to Baudelaire). It is useless to be inspired by Warhol. After him, the objects speak for themselves, like Duchamp’s bride, once she is stripped”. And in this anti-novel, Home strips Hockney bare — literally — of irony and paradox (and most of his clothes and dignity) and positions him in a debauched banality of serial sex and artistic decadence: “Once Hockney had taken off every last stitch, the stranger touched his thigh and the post-grad felt as naked as the disgraced banker Fred Goodwin after he’d been stripped of his knighthood. The art student had a stonking erection. Before he knew it, Hockney found himself on his back in the grass, with the stranger using his right hand to work a five-knuckle shuffle on the nude student’s erect manhood. The man’s grip was firm and the rhythm he used to wank Hockney off was very regular. As he gave the young painter a hand job, this dude simultaneously recited a passage he’d memorised from Les Chants de Maldoror by the Comte de Lautréamont”.
The “stranger” is the American artist R. B. Kitaj and in the next chapter, Home introduces the painter and photographer Derek Boshier — who had known Hockney since 1957 — into the cast amidst a gastronomic breakfast orgy. Home serialises the orgy into all aspects of life — not just sex, but drink, food, fashion, creativity within which the means and modes of production of the artist, the artisan and the viewer/consumer are questioned and thrown into reverse; a bacchanalia of social comment and social position, of aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the working class.
When the figure of Allen Jones appears, Home foregrounds the argument about art and pornography. As Baudrillard states in Forget Foucault, “There is a double absurdity here (everything is political, everything is sexuality), a parallel absurdity in these two catchwords at the very moment when politics collapses and when sex itself becomes involuted and disappears as a strong referent in the hyperreality of ‘liberated’ sexuality”. In focusing on the sex life of Hockney and cohorts, Home asks what is pornography? What is sexuality? What is art? The works of Allen Jones, such as the erotic-fetishistic group of sculptures Hatstand, Table and Chair (1969-1970) were met with protests by feminists at the time but Jones responded by stating, “When I looked at what other avant-garde artists were doing with the figure there was always a kind of prop, something that let the viewer off the hook, that told them ‘this is a work of art’” and Home does this in a literary way, he removes the prop, the genre, the classification: is Art School Orgy a novel? Is it pornography? Is it the ultimate fetishization of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of The Artists?
The father of English Pop art, Richard Hamilton appears, then the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, then — somewhat incongruously — the Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch, then the gallerist and art dealer Robert Fraser (Groovy Bob), and Home sexualises their biographies: “Richard wanted to play his flute. Paolozzi was engaged. Hermann Nitsch, with a little coaxing, was led away by Fraser and good-naturedly asked Hockney to accompany them since he realised the painter would like some rough sex. So the three went off to an all night public toilet. Hockney in such spirits at the chance of doing two, three or even more men that night, didn’t notice that he was roaringly drunk. They found the nearest public toilet full of rough trade looking for a good time. Hockney was able to suck men off while lying on his back with his legs over his shoulders as he pulled an anal train. This left both his arms free and he was able to give hand jobs — two at a time — to those that wanted them”. Hockney has stated that “Sex doesn’t dominate my life at all, really. I think painting does,” but here Home is leading up to a great joke on one of Hockney’s most celebrated paintings, A Bigger Splash (1967).
Painted in California, a few years after Hockney left the RCA and relocated to the USA, A Bigger Splash enacts another kind of Baudrillardian orgy: “On the aromatic hillsides of Santa Barbara, the villas are all like funeral homes. Between the gardenias and the eucalyptus trees, among the profusion of plant genuses and the monotony of the human species, lies the tragedy of a Utopian dream made reality. In the very heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: ‘What are you doing after the orgy?’ What do you do when everything is available — sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death? This is America’s problem and, through America, it has become the whole world’s problem”. In their use of everyday items, a mixture of the banal and the glamorous, of high and low culture, art and pornography, the fetishization of consumption, Home sees the British Pop artists as predecessors to — yet poor relatives of — the American Pop artists. In the scene in which Kitaj gives Hockney an enema, Home is internalising/externalising the three splash paintings — A Bigger Splash, The Splash, and A Little Splash — and transanally irrigating Hockney’s romantic idyll of the Californian swimming pool. The three splashes as an explosion of spunk, precursors to Francis Bacon’s A Jet of Water (1979).
(Aside — I happen to own Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism that once belonged to Kitaj and have had to gingerly check it over for any faecal-hued water stains.)
Kitaj as dom and Hockney as sub: cat o’ nine tails, butt plugs, hooks, cock rings, O-gags, clamps, anal lube and the porn-mag language of “After a few minutes Kitaj gauged just how much cock Hockney could safely handle and thrust harder and deeper. Hockney was pushing up to accept and accommodate the full length of his master’s throbbing gristle. Before long Kitaj had discharged a thick wad of liquid genetics into the veritable seat of Hockney’s being”. And this system of sex objects is also a satire on consumption, on the appropriation of advertising, of the quotidian object, of proliferation and banalisation of desire. Baudrillard again: “There is a profusion of freedom, but this freedom is imaginary; a continual mental orgy, but one which is stage-managed, a controlled regression in which all perversity is resolved in favour of order. If gratification is massive in consumer society, repression is equally massive — and both reach us together via the images and discourse of advertising, which activate the repressive reality principle at the very heart of the pleasure principle”. Kitaj unlocks (unclogs) Hockney’s repressed Britishness through a series of stage-managed gay sex acts, after which “[b]oth men were happy that they’d established just who was the master and who was the slave”.
If we agree that everything is political, everything is sexuality, then Home employs yet another twist to the humour when he has Hockney read The Red Rubber Slave Trade and Other Tales of Man’s Inhumanity to Man, not — as one might think — a tale of gay sadomasochism but a book about the horrendous brutality by the Belgians in the Congo Free State between 1885 and 1908, which inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The difference between sadomasochism and cruelty becomes very apparent when we imagine a pile of post-coital sex objects and a basket full of the amputated hands and feet of the children of Congolese slaves who did not make their daily rubber quota. Somewhere in between these visions is Operation Spanner, in which the police targeted for prosecution gay sadomasochistic acts between consenting adults — a subject Home has written about in the past — and elaborates here with a treatise on CBT (cock and bull torture) with its attendant squeezing, slapping, pinching, binding, slapping, clamping, waxing and parachuting. Look it up.
Home knows his literary as well as his art history and his references to and quotations from Petrarch’s Satyricon, the Marquis de Sade, Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, The Story of O by Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos), firmly locate Art School Orgy in the fictional analysis of pain and pleasure, morals and transgression, master and slave — the sadomasochistic pairing and the Hegelian lord-bondsman dialectic (master-slave dialectic). Yet this novel is also a reimagined history of the early British Pop art scene, which, apart from the characters already mentioned, locates the movement as the apex of the Modernist tradition: “Kitaj was kneeling between Hockney’s legs and once the sub met the sadist’s gaze, the dom bowed and licked the slave’s cock, then raised his head. ‘Come for art, young David Hockney!’ Kitaj announced. ‘Come for the young idea! Come for Francis Picabia, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian! Come for Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra and Gino Severini! Come for Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall, Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters!’ Kitaj then got his mouth around Hockney’s pork sword and sucked it deep into his throat”.
Simultaneously art history, an analysis of British conservatism (the chapter ‘7,500 COVID 19 PPE Ring Donuts For Boris Johnson & NHS Heroes’ is satire at its funniest), an extensive catalogue of sadomasochistic practices, techniques and implements, a handbook of paraphilias, a survey of how the 1950s became the swinging ‘60s, Art School Orgy shows Home at his contrarian and experimental best, refusing to be categorised, going against the grain, pushing against pretence and sanctimony, highlighting the connections and interactions between art, pornography, biography and consumerism, constantly switching between and sabotaging ideas of authenticity, simulation and representation, finally deconstructing, transgressing and refusing categorisation. Or to leave the last words to Baudrillard:
So it is with art, which has also lost the desire for illusion — preferring the elevation of everything to aesthetic banality — and has consequently become trans-aesthetic. For art, the orgy of modernity consisted in the exhilaration of deconstructing the object and representation. During that period, the aesthetic illusion was still very powerful, as is, for sex, the illusion of desire. The energy of sexual difference, which passes into all the figures of desire, has as its counterpart in art the energy of dissociation from reality (Cubism, abstraction, Expressionism), though each of these corresponds to a desire to pierce the secret of desire and the secret of the object. To the point where these two strong configurations, the scene of desire and the scene of illusion, disappear, giving way to the same transsexual, transaesthetic obscenity – the obscenity of visibility and of the inexorable transparency of everything. In reality, there is no longer any pornography identifiable as such, because the essence of the pornographic has passed into all the technologies of the visual and televisual spheres.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Finbow’s works include Allen Ginsberg: Critical Lives (Reaktion Books (2012), Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014), Notes from the Sick Room (Repeater Books, 2017), Death Mort Tod: A European Book of the Dead (Infinity Land Press, 2018) and The Mindshaft (Amphetamine Sulphate, 2020). His The Life of Niccolò di Mescolano – based partly on Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists – will be published in 2023. He is currently collaborating on a work with the Finnish artist Jukka Siikala.
