Cavaliere Blu
alias Adrian Peter
Codex Eroticus
Grosseto, 2022
Between Gothic crickets and bachelor machines
One hundred years after the creation of La Machine Célibataire (The Bachelor Machine) – the name given by Marcel Duchamp to the lower part of his work Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass) also called La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), which is now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – we’re delighted to be presenting at the Museo delle Clarisse another piece featuring dissected bodies and delicately mechanical, outlandish and delirious movements.
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We consider this to be an appropriate and provocative homage – not least because thecreative mind behind these large etched, scribbled and colourful productions, Adrian Peter, is, like Duchamp, a sardonic and cosmopolitan artist. Moreover, he is originally fromSwitzerland, a place that should be famous first and foremost for having given birth to the Dada movement in 1916.
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The Bachelor Machine is a Dadaist piece. In their book «Anti-Oedipus» (1972), Deleuze and Guattari argued that The Bachelor Machine, which had by then become a fixed literary and imaginative theme, fed «intensive quantities» of energy that were created through two opposing forces: repulsion and attraction. Or rather, created from the opposition of these two forces from each other. And Adrian’s fantastical «bachelor machines» also incite the same mixed reactions. On the one hand, they provoke the desire that fragments of feminine and feminised bodies – those most depicted in trivialised erotic imagery – stir in ordinary (and not so ordinary) consumers. On the other hand, they also deny the audience of any sensual pleasure as the composition features a repugnant and phantasmal bestiary that is associated with long and incomprehensible (for those who do not know German) texts with sacred or blasphemous content, or with ideograms and pictograms with a mysterious quality and substance.
What is the point of these mechanical pieces of confusing, cross-cultural visual communication? At first glance, or upon superficial examination, there is no point. They are useless, entropic machines whose activities involve an expenditure of energy with no purpose or end, aside from the mere movement and dissipation of the imagination. Upon closer inspection, however, there is a deeper level of exploration that can gratify the hermeneutic ambitions of the most brilliant intellects and most cultured minds. This solicitation is presented again and again with a sophisticated coherence starting from the title that Adrian gives to his works. A title expressed, significantly, in Latin: Codex eroticus.
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While the modern term «code» generically alludes to a system of signs, signals and symbols, the original term codex (which has always been associated with ancient tomes or excessively embellished collections of laws) implies something with altogether greater rigour, order and authority. Etymologically, codex was also the stump to which slaves were tied for punishment.
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And here, the figures all seem to be erotically bound together by ethereal but also rigid and resistant threads running on suspended pulleys, in the eternal useless movement of bachelor machines. These monstrous figures, however, are first and foremost imprisoned in the bizarre and grotesque forms that define them and which are very similar to the fantastic creatures that invaded Europe between the 14th and 16th centuries: skeletons, winged or multiform beasts, adjoined imaginary beings, animal appendages on anthropomorphic shapes or vice versa, human body parts on Gothic beasts or crickets, in other words: fantastical and mythological monsters borrowed also from the Islamic and Eastern worlds. This is reminiscent of the fauna painted by way of example by Hieronymus Bosch and described by Jurgis Baltrušaitis in his work «Fantastic in the Middle Ages» (1955). A whole hybridised constellation of symbols and images which, collected from distant cultures, became part of the European Gothic tradition before being erased by modern, scientific, humanistic and Renaissance culture.
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Today, we are experiencing that journey in reverse: we have moved on from the modern world to the postmodern, to a world turned upside down, inside out and desecrated, where post-truth triumphs, quotation out of context, the loss of faith in progress, the sublimation of mystery and pleasure immediately evoked and resolved. And so the ghosts of the past also return to meet those of the contemporary, consumerist world, and a new bestiary is revealed that reflects a new Middle Ages of the spirit. A Middle Ages that is shattered and contaminated in vulgar and celestial images, in obscene and sacred texts, in high and low cultural registers that have lost any hierarchy of meaning, value and dignity. Thus, alongside the Renaissance Madonna and Child, the entire pop subculture of comics emerges in these images, from the old Disney mainstream of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to the underground of BDSM culture – continually referred to by the florilegium of sexual instruments such as fishnet stockings and stiletto heels – to the confused jumble of demons, spiders, skulls, prehistoric fish, phalluses and crosses. In the representation of «Gothic crickets», according to some critics, the displacement of heads onto the stomach or behind of anthropomorphic creatures must have had a moralising value and symbolised the displacement of intelligence, which was degraded to serve the lowest appetites. But Adrian’s Gothic crickets are imprisoned in «bachelor machines» so they cannot get married and consequently cannot procreate or generate anything – any kind of meaning or morals – except the attempt to discharge energy, to move it from inside our bodies to outside. That energy needed to understand that, outside, the light has gone out – the light of a world illuminated by science and the renewed fideistic reflux in luminous religions, including ecological and new age religions – and that we have been plunged back into darkness.
Into the darkness of the night, where the stars shine.
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Mauro Papa
Director of the Cultural Centre at Le Clarisse