------ Forwarded Message > From: "dasg...@aol.com" <dasg...@aol.com> > Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 06:41:27 EDT > To: Robert Millegan <ramille...@aol.com> > Cc: <ema...@aol.com>, <jim6...@cwnet.com> > Subject: [2] The "Surreal" Mutilation-Murder of the Black Dahlia >
> http://americareads.blogspot.com/2006/10/exquisite-corpse.html > > David Thomson <http://www.powells.com/review/2006_09_21.html> has a long > review in The New Republic which not only clears up many of the details that > have me confused but also develops an interesting argument about the place of > the Blsack Dahlia in postwar American (and southern California) history, the > movie business, and...(believe it or not) Surrealism. > <http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/1648/2742/1600/hodel.0.png> > Integral to his broader theme is the true story of George Hodel, a man who may > well have killed Elizabeth Short. And the man who figured out Hodel's past? > His son Steve, a retired LAPD homicide detective, who presented the case a few > years ago in a book titled Black Dahlia Avenger. Thomson's essay lays out the > story of that book in his review, but his main subject is another book, > Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and > Sarah Bayliss. > > Here is the third part of Thomson's four-part review: >> >> >> Now comes Exquisite Corpse. It is a strange book, sketchy but unforgettable, >> tendentious but instructive. It is the work of Mark Nelson, a design >> director, and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, an art history journalist. Its area of >> autopsy is that of art history, of a corpse so "exquisite" that complicity >> in its making may extend to a loose circle of surrealists or pseuds in Los >> Angeles who were motivated by sexual curiosity, a search for the acte >> gratuit, and by a larger postwar feeling that evil had been let loose and >> would not go back into the bottle. In brief, Exquisite Corpse reckons that >> the stark whiteness glimpsed on January 15, 1947 was not just a sign of >> murder but also a tableau alluding to several works of art -- a terrible >> private joke. The authors accept George Hodel as the mind making the >> connection, but they feel that he may have been part of a circle of >> picture-makers entranced by the morbid dislocation of body parts that had >> begun with Picasso and Cubism. >> >> >> Exquisite Corpse looks like a coffeetable book, but the coffee is sickly. >> And the reader of Exquisite Corpse needs to have Steve Hodel's book on hand. >> Nelson and Bayliss come no closer to clinching the sort of case that might >> be won in court, but they do spread highbrow suspicion in tracking the >> iconography of the severed body, defaced flesh, and upraised arms. They >> really urge us to look. Surely, you may say, these formal resemblances could >> be mere coincidence -- after all, Picasso was a pioneer in re-arranging the >> body, Magritte did a disturbing and enticing picture of a body-face called >> Le Viol, and many artists of the last hundred years -- the age of film, by >> the way -- were driven by sexual obsession and a taste for non-naturalistic >> representation. Bill Copley did pictures of nudes and clothed doctors with >> exotic rows of surgical hardware. Francis Bacon seems to have had more >> "cuts" of meat than a butcher or a film editor. ("Cutting" is the term that >> connects those two arts.) >> >> >> In linking pictures by Man Ray, Duchamp, and Copley, the authors have made >> us think anew about art and murder. And here's the rub: the intellectual >> daring of such pictures cannot quite be separated from a torturer's coolness. >> Do Man Ray's nude studies of Lee Miller celebrate sex and "togetherness," or >> are they part of a new level of alienation and dismantling aggression in >> which the body gazed upon begins to come apart? There is also the gathering >> of evidence that suggests these artists were spokes in George Hodel's wheel. >> It is all speculation, of course, but the speculation is highly suggestive. >> One way or another, hasn't Los Angeles taken pains to provide us with >> beautiful corpses, and the play of seeming to be their killers? Why should >> artists not be aroused by our recklessness, by our silly faith -- inculcated >> in us by the movies -- that voyeurs cannot cry out in pain because that >> would stop the show? >> >> >> You want examples? OK. In July 1947, Duchamp collaborated on a deluxe >> edition of a catalogue called Le Surréalisme en 1947 for an exhibition at >> the Galerie Maeght in Paris. Nine hundred ninety-nine handmade copies had a >> breast -- a falsie -- on the cover, made of foam rubber surrounded by black >> velvet. You are obliged to hold the breast while reading the catalogue. A >> fine joke; but the authors of Exquisite Corpse add that "it is noteworthy >> ... that Duchamp's image of a single breast appeared just months after >> Elizabeth Short's body, absent her right breast, was discovered." Duchamp >> made several visits to Los Angeles, where he mixed with Man Ray, Bill >> Copley, Walter Arensberg (the art collector), Albert Lewin (the aesthete and >> film director who made The Picture of Dorian Gray), and Lloyd Wright. And it >> is clear that George Hodel was part of the same group. Which proves ...? >> >> >> Or try to follow this trail. Hodel was also associated with the writer Ben >> Hecht. In 1925, in Pasadena, Hodel published a magazine called Fantasia, >> which celebrated Hecht's first novel, The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of >> the Journal of Fantazius Mallare. Magazine and novel alike were heavily >> under the influence of surrealism >> <http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/1648/2742/1600/nelson.0.gif> , of >> fantasies about murders committed in dreams and under hypnosis. The novel >> features a woman who feels that "there was something more to give him. She >> would remove something of herself -- her arm, her breasts, her white >> thighs.... She listened and wished to die in his hands." And Hecht, dabbling >> in psychoanalysis, would write the screenplay of Spellbound, that very odd >> Hitchcock film with a dream sequence by Salvador Dalí, about a man who >> believes he has committed a murder and cannot help reliving it in a dream. >> Put that next to George Hodel's remarks to the police after he was arrested >> for the rape of his daughter, quoted in the Los Angeles Daily News: >> "Everything is a dream to me. I believe someone is trying to hypnotize me. I >> want to consult by [sic] psychiatrist but I don't trust him. He might find >> something wrong with me. If this is real and I am really here, then these >> other things must have happened." None of this would stand up even in a film >> as foolish as Spellbound, though it makes Hodel's acquittal in the rape >> trial harder to credit. >> >> >> More? Well, John Huston was a bit of a sadist, and was also interested in >> hypnosis. And here we come upon delicate ground -- personal comment on an >> artistic hero. Huston was a man of action as well as a great storyteller, but >> also a user of people, a gambler, a reckless soul. As a young man he killed >> someone in a driving accident, and the matter was covered up. And he did say >> that the thing he loved about film-making was the power, the sadism. In The >> Maltese Falcon, Wilmer, the gunsel (Elisha Cook Jr.), looks at Sam Spade's >> body, collapsed after being drugged, and kicks him in the head. In the same >> film, Spade slaps Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) around and hisses, "Wait till he >> learns to like it!" Many years later, in Chinatown, Huston played Noah >> Cross, one of the bleakest villains in Hollywood pictures -- a man who rapes >> his own daughter -- and did him with relish; and in a very bad film called >> De Sade he even played the marquis himself. Huston and George Hodel were >> married to the same woman. Why, I even bumped into Huston once myself at the >> Cannes Film Festival. "Easy there, sonny," he sighed, as if guessing I had >> murder on my mind. >> >> >> The "coup" in Exquisite Corpse is a Duchamp picture called Étant donnés, >> worked on apparently from 1946 to 1966, for which Duchamp took a first >> photograph (of a waterfall) only six months before the murder of Elizabeth >> Short. Six degrees of separation? A waterfall in Europe, I hasten to add -- >> and this news produces something less than a frisson; but then you look at >> the picture, and the splay of the female body seems as fresh and dance-like >> as on that January morning. Had Duchamp seen the first photographs? Did >> someone in L.A. pass them on -- as FYI, or as tribute? Now there's a >> frisson. Of course, Duchamp could have seen the pictures and felt moved to >> imitate them in some way without having a toehold in a murder plot. That is >> the most intriguing point, the complicity that hangs over our repressed >> murderousness, and lends an air of dread to our separated kinship. Sometime >> in the last century we picked up murder -- ordinary murder -- as a kind of >> virus. It is in our blood now, and most of us hope our immune system is >> robust. But we know that first fever of the illness. We have felt it. > ------ End of Forwarded Message
