The step from contemplation to direct inscription - which essentially means abandoning fetishism for the sake of the original curiosity that proverbially turns into anxiety - which structurally balding he didn't intend to do it, he took it Sebald Beham, bringing to 'light' an object that had always previously been (only) obscene, that is, strategically placed off-stage, outside the mise-en-scène, no matter how elaborate. While Baldung's relationship to Düreru can be understood as a vital, artistically necessary process of mannerist 'distortion', of elongation that necessarily occurs to the subject after it has previously been idealistically projected onto the canvas and into the world, whereas Beham's should be placed in the space of pure pathology and illegal (but not illegitimate!) appropriation (which will, among other things, result in a court ruling because an obviously minor artist tried to brutally plagiarize a book on proportions by the recently deceased Master), where corruption - as a philosophical consequence - is taken only as a form of ultimate vulgarization. Hence his key work, the engraving Die Nacht (1548), only an anti-thesis that leaves no room for synthesis: a disruption in the developmental authorial chain that manifests itself as a break in the metaphorical chain.
Although Beham never depicted the act of sexual penetration itself, in works such as Joseph and Potiphar's wife (1526) and Death and the lascivious couple he does not hesitate to find a 'replacement' for it in an indisputable marking - an erect penis, which is more a consequence of the turbulence and displacement of the narrative situation than of unidirectional erotic conditioning. In this sense, Die Nacht is an additional, supplementary compensation that creates an apparent equilibrium that both sides can be involved: Night lying on the bed, while the crescent moon and stars are visible through the window, has such a position of her legs that they 'jump' out in front of the viewer, without blockage, without delay or unusual point of view - precisely her genitals. With a minimal mythological background and a motto that serves only as a cynical hypocrisy for a product that is intended for quick consumption anyway in the erotic market that is becoming increasingly large at the end of the Renaissance, Die Nacht becomes, in retrospect, The origin of the world (1866) before la lettre, with Beham opting not to 'blur' the view - as an 'unnecessary' realistic detail - by pubic hair as in Courbet's famous picture.
Does this 'sharpness' imply that the vagina itself has its own 'ideal', abstract form, even though it is completely turned inwards? The object-gap makes the gaze begin to gape, followed by the coldness of the castration threat. What painters could not represent, about which there was fierce debate and strict prohibitions were recommended, is not much more than a drawn line in front of a void or vacuum. The vulva is the notch of denotation: it cannot mean nothing elseMetonymy running deepens, metaphor always expands.
In the artistic intertwining, although the authors are distant from each other, a significant triangle of influences and redefinitions is nevertheless formed around the core that has variously touched on more or less subtle manuscripts: while Beham, whether for purely commercial or aesthetic reasons, decided to approach the topic quite explicitly, problematizing the lack of restraint in the transmission that certainly retains the traumatic residue, and Baldung to elaborate the metatextual content of utmost importance within the witch iconography, thereby simultaneously introducing his imagery into the realm of perverse fantasy and radical autopoietic construction, Dürer - seeking an appropriate context for a completely different idea - interpreted Baldung's allegorical and Beham's 'realistic' scene as a cardinal essayistic setting, or rather as the point at which the drawing itself is created: another the origin of the world, as an aesthetic phenomenon. Woodcut An artist sketches a naked woman (around 1525) was created as part of a book Instructions for measurements, which was published posthumously in 1538: Dürer wants to illustrate here how the best and most precise treatment of perspective - as a kind of presentation of the Law that would be obligatory for everyone - is applied to the concrete procedure of drawing and painting.
The author creates instructions for use, but what makes this woodcut so significant (perhaps primarily because it reflects the painter's unconscious) is how the depiction, which should be dominated by scientific verification of the Law, an objective presentation of 'events', is overwhelmed, despite all the seriousness of the general intention, by libidinal content: even metapoetics is not devoid of a sexual background. Dürer's desire to scientifically solve the problems of representation, how to maintain mimetic recognizability in transferring a three-dimensional object to a two-dimensional flat surface, on paper, canvas or wooden panel, is staged as a dialectical second stage of the encounter with the maternal thing, where the painter's repertoire always fails in relation to a reality that cannot be completely materially dissolved.
In the woodcut, the artist has made all the preparations and taken the most advantageous position: the mechanism for copying is institutionalized. Through the membrane - the membrane through which the gaze must 'penetrate', so that the reflection would return to the one who owns the copying equipment - the author with pen in hand and eye adjusted to the vertical indicator (or perhaps it is more accurate to say I will preach., since Dürer focuses on the enunciatory process) visually assesses the reclining female body, a pose that, already at that point in the development of the Renaissance, was on the verge of gaining its canonical status as an inevitable part of the rhetoric to present the protagonists as attractively and spectacularly as possible. Perhaps a tense, certainly stiff painter, with a focus that suggests that some kind of vid hyperinvestment, tries to analyze, quantify and qualify the female body that is in front of, but also opposite to him. Precisely separated from the object, the artist would like to find, that is take the right measure to a body that stands strategically at a distance.
Dürer's metastylistic proposition: what if, despite all the available, handy apparatus, geometric and mathematical, scientific calculations, the male experience - in the painterly process - is an experience of deprivation. There is something in the female body that resists approximation, perspectival logic, metaphorical translation. Things are exposed, and yet something is missing: a double lack. For the woman who is to be recorded in Dürer's work is not turned to the side, so as to be entirely horizontally accessible, but lies with her legs partially spread forward, and the drapery thrown back, which subliminally recreates the scene of childbirth: and again, the origin of the world, like loci of initiation and beginning, of establishing originality.
But despite all the engagement, with the entire dispositif placed at his disposal, with the tradition and knowledge that has been adopted and mediated, the only thing the artist can see is the opaque fabric in the growing darkness. The gaze always has its blind spot: even if the drapery were to fall, the female genitalia would still remain in the shadow cast, ultimately, by the very mechanism of representation, the signification process that provokes and prolongs desire. Dürer's meta-essayist conclusion: what if the sharpened painter's pencil, pointed or directed at an empty square surface, is not beginning the inscription, for example, of a vaginal incision or cut (for which, after all, one quick and decisive pen stroke), but just now end - discovering the ultimate constitutional impossibility - of the undertaken inscription process facing with an ineffable object.
Bonus video:
