by John Gorman

Artwork Description

Two women (after Hans Bellmer, 1946)

0.0 x 0.0

Two women (after Hans Bellmer, 1946), 45x35cm, grqphite This composition by John Gorman is clearly indicated by the artist as being inspired by a work by Hans Bellmer of 1946, which we cannot identify but of which we know that in 1945-1946 he made several drawings, which were the starting point for two major projects concerning Sade: À Sade and hisPetit traité de morale, published in 1968 by Éditions Georges Visat. In 1946, he also met Georges Bataille through the publisher Alain Gheerbrant, who edited the second version of Histoire de l’œil in July 1947, illustrated by Bellmer with six etchings and burin engravings. Along with André Masson, Bellmer is undoubtedly the illustrator of Bataille closest to the erotic universe and the writer’s thinking. By disrupting the gaze and anatomy, Bellmer, “a true anatomist of desire”, writes Vincent Teixeira, “a master of formal accidents, […] plays with morphology, the sexual powers of the image and the interchangeable differences between male and female, multiplies erotic metamorphoses, operates ‘transformisms’, creates aberrant chimeras.”Indeed, we see in John Gorman’s composition two bodies of women not only superimposed but also closely intertwined. One, at the bottom of the drawing, seems to be standing on her head, her face marked by a poached eye, the other sewn and small, her mouth wide open, and a long bushy hair that is as much a beard, one might say. She stands balanced on one arm, folded up, and the hairs on her underarm are, for once in John Gorman’s work, indicated. The other arm is reduced to a curved line, indicating rather a shoulder, but there is nothing figurative here. Her large breasts, set wide apart, do not seem to suffer from gravity and stand upright, not sagging. Above them we see the buttocks and thighs, which are also widely apart, perhaps also of another woman, if we follow the title, and her vulva. One leg, dressed in fishnet stockings, rises above them, the knee raised and pointed, and then falls into the very fine line which more or less serves as a frame for the scene. The upper left part is marked by what is perhaps the beginning of a breast, well curved, with a nipple only sketched out, as well as by an abundant quantity of graphite: pubic hair then hair? If this leg and this breast belong to the woman in the upper part, everything is thus shifted, broken, crushed, amalgamated, as in the works cited above by Bellmer, and the twinkling of the two figures is pushed to an extreme that the twentieth-century artist, strongly influenced by Surrealism, was never able to reach. According to John Gorman himself, this drawing is derived more from Sade than from Bataille, although both authors and their illustrated writings can be found here. According to the artist, his references here are also Egon Schiele’s flayed and quartered figures, but also Cézanne’s nudes, and one cannot but agree with his assertions. For my part, I will add Rodin’s most daring drawings, circa 1900, although none of the masters mentioned here, nor Hans Bellmer, reaches such a degree of legible complexity, rough, as the artist says, without any effect or embellishment. The monochromy of the drawing itself, in fact comparable to Bellmer’s engravings, is nevertheless approached quite differently. This work consists only of elementary lines essential to a possible understanding, of graphite flat areas, hard striations, chopped lines, lines that are both soft and stiff at the same time – this wonder being peculiar to John Gorman. It dispenses with all surrealist Bellmerian artifice, but also with all the attributes that Schiele and Rodin attributed to their contorted wives, such as clothing in particular. The fishnet stockings on the left leg are only summarily and deliberately rendered, and we are dealing with a style which, devoid of everything that makes a work gratuitously pretty, appears in a stunning crudeness. In this, yes, it is more in keeping with Cézanne’s later works, and his summary, pre-Cubist, and stingy figures. Needless to say, John Gorman’s drawing retains absolutely nothing of Bellmer’s surrealist style, Surrealism, seductive in poetry, not even being an art form in drawing and painting, in my opinion. Everything here is therefore new, in spite of the claimed references, and the main model, and illustrates the works of Sade more than those of Bataille, the writing of the former being more sober and economical than that of the latter. So why did John Gorman choose as a starting point an artist so far removed from his usual artistic tastes? “As well as the preoccupation as a matter of revealing the usable, belongs to discernment, even mutual concern, guided by respect and indulgence.’’, Heidegger says in Being and Time. Can there be better expressions for the consideration of the other than these concepts of regard and indulgence? Probably not, because there is no real relationship with the other until these realities become a priori principles. Thus, if Heidegger writes these concepts in italics, it is no doubt to show that they must be grasped in a fundamental way, from the perspective of fundamental ontology; that they only receive their true moral sense by situating them in it. So the apriority of these concepts presupposes that they are inscribed in the fundamental constitution of the Dasein’s world-being, in such a way that the latter is freed from the particular and negative considerations where, unfortunately and very often, the other is enclosed. May the Dasein that is mine, have respect for the other and show tolerance towards him or her, participate in the fact that I unquestionably share my being-in-the-world with him or her. And I can only reach the blossoming of my being by integrating the other. Perhaps there is an explanation for John Gorman’s “borrowing” from a real “other”, if not in the literary reference, at least in the artistic style. According to Heidegger, this “respect”, this “tolerance” for/of the other would therefore be a means to access the blossoming of one’s being. Integrating Bellmer’s work while at the same time distancing himself from it, John Gorman would come out of this concern, this necessary otherness, summoned, then transformed, and restored to his own being, in turn enriched by this opening to a world that is foreign to him (style, not Sade, I repeat). On the other hand, and finally, Bellmer plays on “with morphology, the sexual powers of the image and the interchangeable differences between the masculine and feminine”, which also brings us back to Heidegger, but also to what Derrida, John Gorman’s favourite philosopher, who has long been concerned with this subject in his works, has to say about it. I quote Derrida in his Geschlecht III : “Of course, it is not impossible that the desire for an innumerable sexuality would still come to protect us, like a dream, against an implacable destiny that seals everything in perpetuity with the number 2. And this ruthless closure would stop the desire at the wall of opposition, no matter how much we struggled, there would never be only two sexes, neither one more nor one less, the tragedy would have this taste, quite contingent in sum, that we would have to affirm, to learn to love, instead of dreaming of the countless. Yes, perhaps, why not? But where would the “dream” of the countless come from, if it is a dream? Doesn’t it alone prove what it dreams about and who must be there to make people dream?” The dream of an innumerable sexuality must therefore be there to make people dream. It must happen. I spoke about Heidegger’s notion of event in connection with another work by John Gorman, his Deposition, a very recent work, and so I won’t go into it again. But this reference is just as valid in this drawing, as are Heidegger’s and Beaufret’s remarks on the veiling and unveiling and the necessary withdrawal of the Greek being according to the aletheia. Sade, John Gorman’s direct model, did indeed bring about the innumerable sexualities of which Derrida speaks. Bellmer illustrated it. And from the encounter with this other “necessary” to the blossoming of the being was born this work of the artist of the 21st century. A work exposing in the harshness of reality, through its rough and fierce style, this innumerable sexuality. Delphine Costedoat

Artwork Details

Medium: Drawing Other

Genre: Figurative