All Artwork Richard TurnerBook 2008 Grand Central PressAll rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher and artist.

GRAND CENTRAL PRESSCSUF Grand Central Art Center125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, California 92701714-567-7233 714-567-7234www.grandcentralartcenter.com

ISBN: 978-0-9817987-1-4

A story should hAve A beginning, A middle, And An end...but not necessArily in thAt order.

- JEAN-LUC GODARD -

cAPri

Suitcase in hand, I emerge from the shade of the bougainvillea

and cross the patio, passing three reflectors tilted towards the

noonday sun. The sea below is calm, the air is still. Hearing

the sound of activity on the roof above, I glance upward, set

my suitcase down in front of the row of shining reflectors, cross

into the shade of the building and climb the short flight of steps

leading to the grand staircase that mounts to the roof of the Casa

Malaparte. Ascending the stairs, I encounter Francesca/Giorgia

walking down towards the patio. She pauses but passes without

speaking. For a moment our two shadows flow in parallel streams

down the steps. Well then, goodbye. I say nothing to her about

our possible rendezvous in Saigon.

I continue up the widening staircase, keeping to the right. Reaching

the roof terrace, I walk towards Mr. Lang and the camera crew.

The actor playing Ulysses charges towards me with an upraised

sword. My presence interrupts his concentration. He stops, shrugs

with exasperation, and continues on past me. I follow a grip

whos carrying an orange umbrella on his shoulder. He sets up

the umbrella over Mr. Lang, who is seated in his canvas directors

chair, reviewing the shooting script.

Mr. Lang, Ive come to say goodbye.

Mr Lang rises from his chair and shakes my hand.

Goodbye. What will you do?

Go back to Rome, finish my play.

I dont tell him that Im going to Rome to catch a plane for India.

And you? I ask.

Mr. Lang shifts his posture, placing his hands

in the back pockets of his trousers.

Ill finish the film. Always finish what you start.

I turn slightly and look over my shoulder towards the camera crew.

What shot are you doing now?

Ulysses gaze when he first sees his homeland again.

Ithaca.

I shake his hand once again.

Goodbye, Mr. Lang.

Goodbye. I hope well meet again.

As I walk away, I hear the assistant director announce,

Were ready, Mr. Lang. followed by, Quiet on the set.

The script girl marks the shot, the action begins.

The last thing I hear, as the camera travels past Ulysses

to a shot of the sea and the sky, is Silencio.

JAiPur

And now the shadow of the Narivalaya Uttar Gola Yantrathe

behemoth crouching on the stained slab of the observatory

grounds like a sphinxaffords a small triangle of shade on its

eastern side, in which rests a dozing figure.

Why dont you love me anymore? His black fedora is tilted

down over his eyes. His head is inclined towards his chest. He

is slumped to the right against the warm stucco wall, his right

shoulder lower than his left. Why do you despise me? The

astronomical instrument is a yellow stucco structure built on a

north-south axis. Its northern and southern faces consist of large

disks, faced with red sandstone and trimmed with white marble,

which lie parallel to the equatorial plane. Ill never tell you even

if I am dying. His right leg is extended in front of him, the foot

falling to the outside. His left leg is bent at the knee, forming a

vertical triangle rising beside his extended right leg. His right

hand rests in his crotch. His left hand lies over his right arm just

above the wrist. Dont touch me. I dont love you anymore. One

of the two disks points to the north celestial pole. It is used as a

sundial in the summer months. The second disk, on the opposite

face of the building, faces the south celestial pole. A metal

spike in the center of each disk casts a shadow, and a division

of the disk into degrees and minutes completes this equatorial

sundial. Theres no way I will ever love you again. He is wearing

a cream-colored lightweight suit, a blue shirt, open at the collar,

and black shoes. A watch on the wrist of his left arm is visible

just beyond the cuff of his shirt, which extends an inch from the

sleeve of his jacket. Tell me why, there must be a reason. In the

center of the eastern wall of the building is the open door of a

small room used as a storage space for astrolabes, telescopes

and architectural models of the observatorys instruments. Its

too late. Ive changed my mind about you.

The man rolls his head up towards the left, raises his left hand to

his hat, tilting it back on his head as he squints up at the sun. He

then brings his hand down to rub his left eye. He looks down and

to the right through the open door and across the floor of the

storage room as if searching for something that he had misplaced.

Ill never forgive you.

The shadow of the metal spike in the center of the north face of

the sundial has moved 5 degrees. The man pushes himself up out

of the shade of the structure, brushes off the seat of his pants,

adjusts his hat, glances at his wristwatch and walks across the

plaza of the observatory. Looking right, and then left, he calls

out. He pauses and calls out again. Continuing to walk, his hands

in his pants pockets, he turns away and calls once more into the

echoing silence. I loved you so much.

sAigon

Once again, I walk on through the traffic that eddies around me

the bicycles, the blue truck, the motorcycles, the white van, the

busses, the pedicabsonce again through this labyrinth of yellow

buildings, beneath these green arcades that tower over the endless

boulevards, through this web of dreams where every street leads

me to her, where every street leads me away from her.

I step out of the traffic into a caf, crossing from the ochre grid

of the sidewalk tile onto the rose-patterned tile compass of the

caf floor. I take a seat in a rattan chair, or a plastic chair, or a

wrought iron chair, or at a dark table.

Iced coffee with milk?

Yes.

I wait for her. Where is she, what is she doing? Is she crossing

the room of an apartment, exiting the door of a theater? Is she

waiting, her back to a tree, looking up at a light in a second-story

window. Is she glancing to the left, the tip of a pen in her mouth,

or looking up over the drink that she is sipping through a straw? Is

she combing her hair or brushing it back from her face, picking up

her purse from the top of the dresser, putting on her makeup? Did

she ride past me on her bicycle when I was walking, once again

through the traffic of the city.

A waiter, dressed in white shirt, black vest and pants silently

sets a white saucer on the black tabletop, places the glass of

iced coffee with milk on the saucer and recedes from view. The

black lacquered surface of the table reflects the underside of

the saucer dimly in the morning light, which is, itself, reflected

from the yellow wall of the building across the narrow street.

The tan liquid of the drink is accented by dark opalescent spots

where the ice presses against the inside of the glass. Rivulets of

condensation streak the faceted surface of the glass. The draft

from the overhead fan agitates the paper napkin beside the

glass into nervous motion. A waitress sets coasters on the tables

in preparation for the noon meal which is still two hours away.

Murmured conversations in several languages are interwoven

with the sounds of the traffic and the strains of the music coming

from the speakers mounted between the fluorescent light tubes

and the angled mirror above the door. Drinks come and go on

saucers carried back and forth. Dishes are stacked and removed.

The tile floor is continually being swept.

I leave the caf once again, walking across the tile floor, the rose-

patterned tile compass floor receding behind me beneath the

dark legs of the chairs and tables, past the kickplate of the bar

and around the potted plants beside the door.

I return to my room. The afternoon heat is overpowering. I keep

my room in semidarkness with the shutters closed, but, even so,

the air is heavy and damp. I lie on my bed staring at the ceiling,

moving only to search for a cooler place on the sheet. I cannot

sleep. I wait for her. See my feet in the mirror? Think theyre

pretty? You like my ankles? And my knees too? And my thighs?

See my behind in the mirror? Do you think I have a cute ass? Shall

I get on my knees? And my breasts, do you like them? Which do

you like better, my breasts or my nipples? You like my shoulders?

And my arms? And my face? My mouth, my eyes, my nose, my

ears? Then you love me totally?

I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.

this beAutiful frAud: cinemAtic memory And richArd turners

Contempt mandala- HOLLY MYERS -

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world, Godard famously declared, clearly relishing the threat these two words pose to one another, lying side by side in a sentence: beautiful and fraud. Beauty is truth, as the adage goes; cinema, as Godard had it, is truth at twenty-four frames per second. But what is more fraudulent than a vision of life told in flickering shadows? Life is a mess of solids, liquids, tastes, smells and continually fluctuating temperatures. Cinema is a beam of light projected on a flat, silver surface, surrounded by a layer of recorded sound. Cinema is Brigitte Bardot swimming nude off the coast of Capri and sunbathing with a paperback open across her rear. The camera, as Godard (erroneously) quotes Andre Bazin in the opening credits of Contempt, substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.1 Its relationship to the actual world is psychologically arbitrary and sensorially abstractas fraudulent (and gripping) as the neurological shadows that flicker through our brains while dreaming.

But beauty, as Godard knew well, creates its own truth. We know, in Contempt, that Bardot is not Camille, not an ex-typist, not Michel Piccolis wifeshes Bardot; neither she nor Godard make an especially strenuous effort to convince us otherwise. Indeed, shes hardly a character at all in the traditional psychological sense: her reactions are inconsistent; her motives obscure; her tone of delivery generally rather hollow. But she is an image of such extraordinary potencysulking eyes, swollen lips, opulent curves and primally abundant blond hairthat her shift from amorous reverie into derision and scorn (Dont touch me, I dont love you anymore, theres no way Ill ever love you again) carries a haunting quality of existential doom.

Cinematic beauty, for those who fall prone to it, is a formidable force. Larger than life, yet lighter than air, it slips clean past the gates of reason to sear itself onto the memory directly. Godards mastery of it, to be fair, goes well beyond his framing of Bardots fair buttocks and the oceanic vistas of Capri. Another famous Godardian dictum: Beauty

is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion. These two elements are woven inextricably at almost every turn in Contempt, a film devoted to the uneasy relationship between the Classical and the Modern. Antique artifacts mingle with sleek, modernist pieces of furniture; Bardot and Piccoli shift repeatedly between stylish contemporary attire and toga-like towels and sheaths; a landmark of postwar European cinema (the Cinecitt studio) is shot to resemble a ruin, crumbling and deserted; an icon of Italian Rationalism Casa Malaparte (the Hollywood producers villa)suggests an ancient pagan temple; and the actors in the film-within-the-film of the Odyssey, that quintessential Classical narrative, are cast in blazing Technicolor. The complexity, originality and sheer charm of this formal economy is such that even the most cursory viewing of the film leaves a distinct visual imprint in the mind.

There are innumerable volumes of discourse devoted to the study of the cinematic gaze how it works, where it goes, what it does, who it exploits and why. Far less has been written of cinematic memory: what occurs not when were looking at the screen, but when we stop looking, when we leave the theater and return to our everyday lives. Powerful filmsbeautiful films, in the broad sense of the wordinfiltrate our being. Their images weave themselves into our mental, emotional and imaginative lives, churning up comparisons and associations, tangling with other memories (real or imagined), grafting themselves to ideas and beliefs, fueling future arguments, and informing our approach to every subsequent film, book, person, place and love affair we are likely to encounter. This beautiful fraud, when churned through the mill of the psyche, becomes as true a figment of consciousness as any flesh-and-blood experience.

It is in this experiential sense that Godards cinemascopic masterpiece figures into Richard Turners Contempt Mandala project. Turner saw the film for the first time

in his early 20s, as an undergraduate at Antioch College. A few years earlier 195961, hed been living in Saigon, the son of a forensic science professor who was involved in a police training program there. A few years later 196768, hed be in Jaipur, Rajasthan, in India, studying miniature painting on a Fulbright. The three experiences have little in common, objectively, but for the fact of their happening to occur in this sequence in this particular individuals life. As the mandala project seeks, in part, to demonstrate, however, that fact is an ample starting point, profound in its banality. What is any life, after all, but the sum total of a particular sequence of formative experiences? And what is any artist but the product of those experiences funneled through the filter of a certain combination of influences? Godard, Truffaut and the other Nouvelle Vague filmmakers were among the first to make that equation explicit in cinema, clearing the way for the Tarantinos of the postmodern era and the samplers and parodists of today. Turner follows a similar tack here, building on this triad of experiences, represented, in the project, by the three locationsSaigon, Capri, Jaipurwith ever-widening orbits of reference and association. The Jantar Mantar, an 18th-century observatory built by the maharajah Jai Singh II, founder of Jaipur, figures in, as does the work of 20th-century Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, the history of Minimalism, images of space travel, Joseph Mankiewiczs The Quiet American (1958), and Harish Chandra Sain, a contemporary painter of traditional Rajasthani miniatures.

A mandala, as Turner notes in the projects lexicon, is a pictorial representation of the cosmos: a model for the structure of life itself, intended to remind us of our relationship to the infinite, the world that extends both beyond and within our bodies and minds. Turner has been exploring the form in his work since his time in Rajasthan, but that exploration comes to its most complete fruition in the Contempt Mandala, a large-scale installation revolving around a circular table, 15 feet in diameter and divided into pie-shaped sections, with a model of Casa Malaparte at the center and

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other related fragmentsa Classical bust, a small video screen with footage from the film, the model of a labyrinthemanating outward. Projected on the wall behind the table is a four-part video that weaves footage of the film with footage of the Jantar Mantar, The Quiet American, the making of the table itself, and the present-day street life of Saigon, into which Turner imagines Michel Piccolis character disappearing after he leaves Capria cinematic strategy that echoes Godards weaving of multiple storylines (Paul and Camille, Odysseus and Penelope, Fritz Lang and the producer) in Contempt. A related network of references churns through the paintings and sculptures that circle the periphery of the installation as well, some done by Turner himself, others by traditional Jaipuri artists hes commissioned (Sain, the miniature painter; Ajay Solanki, a retired painter of movie posters; and Padam Chand Sharma, a sculptor whose workshop fashions Hindu deities). This catalog extends the circle of the mandala into a literary realm, with short works of fiction that project Paul and Francesca into new situations and experiences, as if the characters werelike Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoliactors for hire, capable of filling multiple roles.

Taken as a whole, the Contempt Mandala project is a representation of Turners own artistic cosmos, a model for the structure of his creative life. Its best read not as a memoirhe offers little in the way of personal informationbut as a sort of schematic: an index of the active elements of one particular psyche, accumulated over the span of more than 40 years. At its center lies the Casa Malaparte, a long, red, rectangular structure that tapers at one end into a flight of stairs, and juts like a ship, at the other, into the waters of the Mediterranean. In the last shot of Contempt, Fritz Langs mute, rather tawdry Odysseus stands at the edge of this latter end, arms raised, gazing out at the sea as if toward home to which he longsor, in the highly personalized reading of Michel Piccolis character Paul, is disinclinedto return. It is also the point from which Paul himself departs, released from (or abandoned by) his own Penelope, and enters the sphere of Turners narrative.

Who can say why one film draws us over others, why a particular imagelike Casa Malaparteplants itself in the imagination, taking root among the disparate touchstones that make us who we are? When I asked Turner about his attraction to the film, he told me he was struck by the way in which a single misunderstood word/glance could result in a dramatic reversal of fortune. (Casa Malaparte, of course, is the hinge of this reversal: the site at which Pauls relationship collapses and the perpetual homecoming of marriage inverts into a departure.) The first time I saw the filmI was also in my early 20sI have to admit I fell asleep. The next time I saw it, however, years later, I was dazzled by its aquatic whites and sweet, searing reds, by its agile structure and strange, languid precision. It is the sterling virtue of cinema, this beautiful fraud, that, at its best, offers so much to so many. Turners project illustrates the mechanics of this virtue. Insofar as Contempt is a film about the making of film, Contempt Mandala is an artwork about the making of an artwork testaments to the joy of looking, thinking, absorbing, drawing connections, raising questions, reveling in the wealth of preexisting canons, and regenerating all this energy into objects of ones own.

1 The actual quote, according to Jonathan Rosenbaum, comes from Cahiers du Cinma critic Michel Mourlet, in

an article written several months after Bazins death: Since cinema is a gaze which is substituted for our own

in order to give us a world more in harmony with our desires, it falls on faces, on radiant or bruised but always

beautiful bodies, with this glory or this heartbreak which show the same primordial nobility, an elected race

that, exhilarated, we recognize as our own, the ultimate progress in life towards the god. (See Rosenbaum,

On the Necessity of Film Canons, Baltimore, MD; Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.)

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memory And reconstruction: film And the stuff of Art

- SCARLET CHENG -

cinemA And the century it mAde

Today, film is our literature.

We frequently quote lines and cite scenes from films to illustrate a point; we hold up this or that character as a hero or an anti-hero, to admire or emulate, or not. Actors who portray memorable characters become role models for appearance and lifestyle their hair, their clothing, their romantic liaisons and their political allegiances are dissected in endless reportage. Auteur-directors like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Ang Lee, who capture the zeitgeist, are cultural heroes. True, the written word still exists and thrives, and many a movie is adapted from a novel or a magazine article, but it took Rene Zellwegers embodiment of Bridget Jones in a movie to give author Helen Fieldings character worldwide renown. (And, of course, Fieldings novel makes knowing reference to Jane Austens classic comedy of manners, the novel Pride and Prejudice.)

In the 20th century, narrative cinema arguably became the most powerful art form of all. Where the popular imagination had previously been ruled by the stuff of the written wordnovels, poetry and playsfilm has taken over as our common frame of reference. And while it is true that television infiltrated our cultural landscape in the second half of that century, and even as we spend increasing amounts of time on the Internet, film still remains a key reference point in daily life, both in private and public discourse.

Much has been written about why film is so powerfulit is visual, it is aural, it is visceral. One watches film in a darkened room, locked into a seat, presumably blocking out all other stimuli. (Or at least that is how one watches film traditionally; the home video/DVD phenomenon has radically changed the circumstances under which we view film.)

46

Film is everywherein news articles and advertisements; and it is often a topic of conversation around the coffee cart at the office and at school. Seeing the latest hit film is considered to be an essential component of cultural literacy.

Visual artists have not been immune to this inundation. Andy Warhol was probably the first major artist to tap the nerve of our collective cinematic memory. In August 1962, he decided to take up screen-printing as a fine art medium. Marilyn Monroe had just died of a drug overdose, and Warhol, who had always been fascinated by celebrity and glamour, chose her as his subject. He found a publicity photograph from the 1953 film Niagaraa film in which Monroe played, atypically, a villainessand worked it into a series of silkscreen portraits, often using fluorescent colors. These portraits zoomed in on Monroes sultry facethe brows arched, the eyes heavy-lidded and bruised with eye shadow, the lips slightly parted. This was Monroe at her peak, and Warhol enhanced the iconographic impact by blowing up the image and showing it in multiples. He called forth the associations we held in our minds. We see That Face, and we recall Monroes effervescent humor, her baby-doll appeal, her red-hot glamour in an extraordinary run of hitsHow to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,and, of course, Some Like It Hot. She often played slightly ditzy but lovable babes in need of female friendship and masculine protection. Then we also think about the poor woman on the downhill crash when her career went sour, finally dying of a drug overdose.

Coincidentally, as Richard Turner pointed out to me after Id decided to use the Warhol example, there was actually a correspondence between Warhol and Jean-Luc Godard, whose film Contempt is the takeoff point for the current art installation. Both were in love with classic Hollywood. Godard was particularly taken with favorite auteurs such as Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, while Warhol was taken with on-screen goddesses such as Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor.

Contempt, the film

In his epic multimedia work Contempt Mandala, Turner evokes and reworks a non-Hollywood film, a film from the French New WaveGodards Contempt of (1963). Contempt stars Michel Piccoli and Brigitte Bardot as Paul and Camille Javal, a married couple who are about to become estranged. Paul, a screenwriter, takes on a rewrite job when offered cold, hard cash by a crass and megalomaniacal American producer, Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance). In the film, the director is Fritz Lang, playing himself and representing genteel European culture, and the project is a film version of Homers Odyssey, a cornerstone of Western civilization.

Perhaps there is some measure of autobiography in all estimable works of art, deliberate or not. Pauls selling himself out to the American dollar reflects, to some degree, Godards own compromise. The film was made on the strength of Bardots sex-bomb appeal, and Contempts producers, Carlo Ponti (Italian) and Joseph E. Levine (American), insisted that the director use her in cheesecake manner throughout the film. Godard capitulated. He added a scene of Paul and Camille in bed at the beginning of the film, with a naked Bardot stretched out for the audience to ogle. The camera slips down the length of her exposed back and up again so we can get a good look at her. (Critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote in the New Republic, Those interested in Brigitte Bardots behindin Cinemascope and colorwill find ample rewards in Contempt.1) Meanwhile, Paul is not only covered up to his waist in a sheet, but wearing a T-shirt to boot. Godard also shows Bardot taking a bath in the middle of the film, and sunbathing nude toward the end of the film.

When Prokosch shows interest in Camille, Paul deliberately creates time and space for them to be alone. In the small clip we get to see of Langs filmand in subsequent cutswe are made to associate Paul with Ulysses; Camille with Ulysses long-suffering

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wife, Penelope, who fights off a series of suitors while waiting for her husband to return from war; and Prokosch with Neptune/Poseidon, the god of the sea and Ulysses sworn enemy. In Contempt, Camille will give in to Prokosch, though not without Pauls encouragement.

I dont believe in being too reverent to the French New Wave, which encompassed good films and bad films, good filmmakers and mediocre ones, as well as some cultural and period tropes we may now find objectionable. As much as he loved aspects of classic Hollywood, Godard had a certain anti-American streak which is incarnated by the obnoxious Prokosch. Pauls kowtowing to Prokosch echoes not only Godards own acquiescence to Hollywood but also, perhaps how Godard saw himself and the rest of the world kowtowing to the steamroller of America, which had emerged as a superpower after World War II. Bardot incarnates the femme fatale. That is, shes an objectan object of desire for the menand when shes served her usefulness to the story, shes eliminated. Still, we are made to feel some sympathy for her, for its clear that Paul has set in motion their fissure.

We do have to consider Contempt within its context, the 1960s. The 60s were a heady timethe controversial war in Vietnam, worldwide student unrest, the womens liberation movement, all exploding in demonstrations and riots on college campuses, city streets and other public spaces. Filmmakers were at the vanguard of both capturing the zeitgeist and creating it. As A.O. Scott recently wrote in the New York Times, in reviewing a film series devoted to films of the 1960s, More than any other art form, cinema captured the energy, the truth, of the times. To an extent rarely matched before or since, filmmakers did not simply record the upheavals and crises of the time; they were participants and catalysts.2

Contempt, the insPirAtion

Richard Turner became an adult during this tumultuous decade, and he sees himself as fundamentally shaped by it. As a teenager, he had lived in Vietnam from 1959 to 1961, while his father was teaching forensics in Saigon. I was there at an impressionable age, the artist says. It was there I discovered love and literature. It was there that I decided to become an artist.3 In 1967, he flew to India to teach on a Fulbright grant. It was the Summer of Love, and young Americans and Europeans went to India in search of exotic adventures and spiritual alternatives. These sojourns abroad instilled two powerful forces within Turner: his identification with the outsider, and his fascination with Asia.

In the years between his experiences in Vietnam and India, Turner was a college student. Eager to see the latest films, he became enamored of the French New Wave. These films, made by a new generation of French filmmakers, seemed highly avant-garde in their loose narratives, their frequent use of location shooting, and their experimental framing and montage. In the mid 1960s, as an undergraduate at Antioch College, he saw Contempt. Having been exposed to French culture in Saigon, he was open to being a Francophile.

Contempt was re-released in the 1990s, this time as warmly embraced by American critics as it was coolly rejected before. Turner went to see it again. He wanted to see whether it would have any personal resonance or offer any formal satisfaction. It met my expectations on both counts, he says. I find Contempt to be Godards most accessible, economic, and uncluttered film.

Fast-forward to 2008. Through a series of paintings and sculpture, a video and a commissioned novella, Turner projects the character Paul Javals future as a ceaseless wanderer, just as Ulysses wandered after the fall of Troy and the gods conspired to

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keep him from reaching home. (Though, of course, Ulysses does reach home in the end, after a series of colorful escapades in strange and wondrous lands.) Turners project juxtaposes Greco-Roman busts and columns that refer to the Odyssey with miniaturist paintings done in the traditional Rajasthani style by artist Harish Chandra Sain.

Part of Contempts irony and humor comes from the fact that the characters come together over an international co-production, and they speak in different languages, translated by Prokoschs assistant, Francesca (Giorgia Moll), when shes around. When shes not around, they make do by speaking their own languages laced with words and phrases of the listeners language. Meanwhile, in the film within the film, the story of Homera poet of ancient Greeceis being reinterpreted by a German director, then a French screenwriter under the coercion of an American producer. When this polyglot world collapses, Paul packs up his suitcase and takes off. In the film, we dont know where hes headed next. Turner creates his destination.

Turners Paul first heads to India, then to Vietnamboth of which, of course, have personal relevance for the artist. In Western literature and film, Asia is often associated with self-discovery and self-reinventionhappy associations in such films as Lost Horizon (from whence cometh Shangri-La) and Seven Years in Tibet, but demonic ones in Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now.

In India, the imagined Paul visits the Jantar Mantar, a series of astronomical observatories and instruments built by the Maharaja Jai Singh II of Jaipur in the 18th century. It was the Maharajas desire to measure the heavens, as well as to display his own worldly power for all to see. (Visually, these buildings, with their geometric forms and flights of stairs, reminded Turner of Casa Malaparte, the house in Capri where Godards film ends.) In Saigon, Paul encounters Francesca again. Giorgia Moll, who plays Francesca, was featured in a film which Godard lauded, The Quiet American

(1958), a film set in French Indochina. Thus, the various elements of Turners Contempt Mandalaincluding the large mandala which dominates the installation evoke scenes of India and Vietnam, classical versus modern culture, and Pauls comings and goings.

The installation space will be dimmed so that the accompanying video, projected on a long wall, can be better seen. The video is in four parts, each one picking up a different strand of inspiration, but all using clips from Godards film and unified by music. The first three parts of the video make full use of the moody, portentous theme music for Contempt written by Georges Delerue; the last part has music by modern minimalist Philip Glass.

Part One, The Red Car, intercuts scenes from the film with scenes of the sculptural components of Contempt Mandala under constructionthe cutting, the painting, the assembly. It strikes me that many of the film clips are about the making of as well, including clips of the movie camera panning and tilting, the crew setting up a shot outdoors, and so on. Part Two, The Jantar Mantar, opens with a carved-out detail from one of the buildings floating through deep space, rather like that mysterious slab in Stanley Kubricks 2001. Meanwhile, we hear the dialog from the opening of Contempt, where Camille asks Paul a series of questions, Do you like my ankles, my knees, my thighs, my ass, my breasts? and Paul answers every time, Yes, very much; yet, in the asking, Camilles deep insecurity is revealed.

For me, Part Three, Francesca/Phuong, is a wonderfully lyrical homage to actress Giorgia Moll and the power of the moving image. The title refers to the roles Moll played in Contempt and The Quiet American. Here, Turner has put together a series of loosely parallel scenesFrancesca and Paul take a walk through the movie lot in Contempt; a British man and Phuong walk down a street in the earlier, black-and-white The Quiet American; Francesca thoughtfully puts a pen to her lips while in the

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screening room; Phuong sips a drink from a straw. Part Four is especially hypnotic, with the insistent piano refrain over images of Paul in nonstop motionwalking, entering, climbingintercut with shots of busy Hanoi intersections flowing with an unending stream of bicycles, motorcycles and trucks.

In effect, Paul becomes Turners alter ego, his fate having passed from Godards Contempt to the wider geography and cosmos of Contempt Mandala. Pauls new life reflects experiences undergone by the artist, particularly during the era when the artist had first seen Contempt and felt the heady seduction of the both the exotic and the quixotic in Asia. Paul becomes the eternal wanderer, the perennial outsider. This is an Odysseus who may never find his way home, so enamored of the journey has he become.

1 Stanley Kauffmann, Conjugations of Love, New Republic, January 2, 1965.2 A. O. Scott, The Spirit of 68, New York Times, April 27, 2008.3 Richard Turner, various interviews with author, 2008.

Scarlet Cheng is an art critic and film historian. She writes frequently about the visual arts and film, and has

been published in the Los Angeles Times, Art Ltd., Coagula Art Journal, ArtNews, Art & Auction, Premiere,

Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and others. During a sojourn in Hong Kong in the 1990s, she was managing

editor of Asian Art News and arts writer for the South China Morning Post. In addition to writing, Cheng

currently teaches film history at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and Otis College of Art and

Design in Los Angeles.

godArd refers to his films As essays, both in the sense of something

thAt is shorter And more PersonAl thAn A treAtise And in the sense

of a try or an attempt. both of these definitions would APPly equAlly

to the Contempt mandala ProJect. the oPen-ended nAture of the

enterPrise cAn be seen in the mAteriAl in this section, which revisits

godArds film And ProPoses AlternAte versions of existing Pieces As

well As future comPonents for the ProJect.

If Casa Malaparte, like the mandala table, were to embark on a global odyssey, then these images might be thought of as sightings by citizens of Italy, India and Vietnam.

56

Works in progress.

Left to right: Ajay Solanki sketching layout for a painting; studio of Padam Chand Sharma; Harish Chandra Sain; Jantar Mantar models.

58

Godard and Warhol shared a passion for HollywoodGodard the films of classic directors such as Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, Warhol the glamour of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Tayloreven as they both studiously disregarded or reworked industry conventions in their films. Godards use of posters advertising films he admired and commercial commodities as set-dressing, as well as the primary palette of his color films (especially the titles) echoes Warhols pop content and off-the-rack color choices.

Godard could have used one of Warhols many Mao portraits to reference the history of Casa Malaparte, which, for a period after the owners death, was deeded to the Chinese government. He might also have used Warhols Orange Disaster #5 or one of his Skull silkscreens as a means of foreshadowing the automobile accident at the end of the film that kills Camille and Prokosh.

If Jack Palances character, Jeremy Prokosh, in addition to being a film producer, had been an art collectoras many people in the movie industry areGodard might have had him collect these De Chirico paintings that, in my opinion, sweetly suggest the amorous and tragic aspects of Camille and Pauls relationship.

Works by Edward Hopper, an artist whose interest in the cinema is apparent in many of his paintings, could have been chosen by the art director for the film. Hoppers paintings share the formal austerity and stylized emotions of Le Mpris, and could serve as comment on the estrangement of Paul and Camille. In Paul and Camilles Rome apartment, there is a framed image of a theater on the wall above the table at which Paul does his writing. Replacing that image with a painting of a theater by Hopper would be consistent with both Godards frame of reference and my own imagined revision of the film. His Rooms by the Sea could almost be a view from the interior of Casa Malaparte. If I had been the art director for Contempt, I might have dressed the set with paintings that referenced the Jantar Mantar and the Contempt Mandala project.

60

Frames from Godards storyboard for Le Mpris might have resembled these sketches.

Works in progress.

Digital sketches for two paintings and a drawing based on works by De Chirico.

62

Digital sketch for a painting based on a Tantric astronomical drawing.

Digital variations on De Chiricos The Return of Ulysses.

64

Top to bottom: Paul and Camille are transposed from Casa Malaparte to Le Corbusiers Valla Savoye, a better-known icon of modern architecture that might also have served Godards purposes; Paul Javal/Michel Piccoli contemplates a map that is a composite of Capri, Jaipur and Saigon; Paul/Michel is transposed from the roof of Casa Malaparte to the Jantar Mantar and the roof of the Villa Savoye.

If, perhaps as an assistant director, I could have influenced Godard, these paintings by De Chirico, and others from the series,

Things happened with sudden, wild, enchanted, recklessness.

We used to live in a cloud of unawareness, in delicious complicity.

66

Id end up in Pauls arms, hardly aware of what had happened.

This recklessness was now absent in Camille, and thus, in me.

Could I now, prey to my excited senses, observe her coldly, as she could, undoubtedly, observe me?

We used to live in a cloud of unawareness...would be used to illustrate the flashback sequence in which Godard reprises the

demise of Paul and Camilles marriage.

My initial encounter with the Jantar Mantar in 1967 brought to mind the empty plazas and severe architecture of De Chiricos paintings. When I returned to the observatory in 2003, I was more interested in the way in which the astronomical instruments could be understood as both architecture and sculpture. This realization led me to thoughts of Richard Serras Torqued Ellipses and Walter De Marias installation at Dia: Beacon. The cosmic nature of the Jantar Mantars instruments and their function as measuring devices reminded me of aspects of Robert Smithsons Spiral Jetty and Frank Stellas Protractor series. Wandering through the grounds of the observatory one afternoon, I thought about how much

ProPosAl for An imAgined seminAr in JAiPur

68

these artists (Smithson in spirit form) might enjoy the experience of being around these forms. I imagined a seminar that would bring the group of them together for a week in Jaipur. As a way of bringing them to India, in my imagination, I commissioned Harish Chandra Sain to paint copies of an iconic image of a work by each one of the artists. As I have continued working on the Contempt Mandala project, I have encountered the work of artists who have found inspiration in the astronomical instruments of the Jantar Mantar. These include Anselm Kiefer, Gabriel Orozco and Joao Louro. They would also be invited to participate.

lexicon

A Thousand Tempting Beauties. . . They Fought Like Ten Thousand Unchained Tigers! Made in 1961, three years before Contempt, the sword-and-sandal epic starred Louis Jourdan and Sylvia Syms and featured Michel Piccoli in the role of Console Publicola. Michel Piccolis experience in Amazons of Rome undoubtedly contributed to his understanding of the dilemma that his character, Paul, faces in Contempt. Paul is hired to rewrite the screenplay for a film version of the Odyssey. Jeremy Prokosch, the insensitive American producer, wants Paul to put more sex and action into the film. Fritz Lang, who plays a German director named Fritz Lang, has no tolerance for Prokoschs crass suggestions. He has his own stately vision for the film. Piccolis character is torn between his respect for Langs work and his desire to make enough money to pay for a new apartment for himself and his beautiful wife, Camille.

Roger Vadims 1956 directorial debut broke box-office records and censorship taboos in its teasing display of sex and eroticism set in the sunny vacation playground of the Saint-Tropez seashore. Vadim ushered in the era of continental attitudes toward sex and christened the voluptuous Brigitte Bardot (his wife) the worlds original sex kitten. Bardot brings this persona, which she honed in a subsequent series of sex comedies, to Camille, her character in Contempt. Bardot reportedly had expressed interest in doing a serious film. Her star presence was essential in securing a commitment from the studio. Godard acknowledges Bardots screen history (and the producers desire to capitalize on her allure) in the opening shots of the film, where the camera pans across her naked body. His use of red and blue filters, however, desexualizes her and distances the audience from her renowned sensuality. Yet she remains Brigitte Bardot throughout the film, never allowing her character Camille to eclipse her own stardom.

In The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999), Walter Benjamins final, unfinished work, the author writes, The city is the realization of that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth. It is this reality to which the flaneur, without knowing it, devotes himself. . . Whoever sets foot in a city feels caught up as in a web of dreams where the most remote past is linked to the events of today. . . The street conducts the man into a vanished time. For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private. In Contempt Mandala, Benjamins Paris becomes Paul/Michel Piccolis Saigon. The casual wanderings of Benjamins flaneur become the disorienting search of the hybrid character Paul/Michel Piccoli.

AmAZons of rome

(Le Vergini di Roma)

And god creAted womAn

(Et Dieu . . . Cra La Femme)

the ArcAdes ProJect

72

Written by Paul Tate and Richard Turner (Latitudes Press, 1988), the novel follows a pair of rootless American travelers, Miller and Dean, who first lose themselves in the labyrinthine mazes of Leh, the capital of the Himalayan Shangri-la of Ladakh, and then reunite in the exotic bazaars of the desert city of Jaisalmer, a remote outpost in western Rajasthan. Like Paul/Michel in Contempt, Miller loses at love by subordinating it to his quest for identity, and like Michel/Paul, Dean loses at life by becoming a mere flaneur, without bearings, his fate determined by ruthless characters who surprise and overwhelm him. Though they wander across vastly different continents and cultures, their bugbears return again and again to defeat them, as if time were moving in a circle. Miller and Dean are separate characters, but in the novel they often function as different aspects of a single personality. In this respect they are prototypes for the Paul Jarval/Michel Piccoli character.

In this 1955 film based on a play by Clifford Odets, Jack Palance plays a movie star beset by the demands of a ruthless producer played by Rod Steiger. Palances character wants to assert his independence but cannot abandon the Hollywood lifestyle to which he has grown accustomed. This role may well have prepared Palance for the role of the self-absorbed, insensitive producer Jeremy Prokosch in Contempt. In The Big Knife, his character is on the receiving end of what he dishes out to Paul Jarval in Contempt. Palances characters attachment to his high-living Hollywood lifestyle in The Big Knife parallels Pauls commitment to purchasing an apartment for himself and Camille which confuses his commitment to art and results in his pandering to Prokosch.

Cahiers du Cinma (Notebooks on Cinema) is an influential French film magazine. One of its cofounders, Andre Bazin, is quoted (erroneously) by Godard in the opening shot of Contempt. Godard himself wrote numerous articles for the magazine, including one in which he reviewed director Joseph Mankiewiczs The Quiet American. It has everything brilliant actors, sparkling dialogue but no cinema. Nevertheless, he declared it to be the most interesting film to be about at the moment and rated it the best film of 1958. Godards respect for this film could well be the reason that he chose Giorgia Moll, the actress who played the female lead in The Quiet American, to play the role of Francesca in Contempt. Articles by Godards colleagues in Cahiers du Cinma resulted in critical reevaluation of the work of directors such as Fritz Lang and Nicholas Ray. Rebel Without a Cause, which Ray directed, starred James Dean and Natalie Wood. Natalie Wood was

the AZiAtic hotel

the big Knife

cAhiers du cinmA

cAPri

cAsA mAlAPArte

one of the actresses considered for the roll of Camille. Shortly before James Deans untimely death in an automobile wreck in 1955, he and Nicholas Ray were considering making a film together based on a short story by Alberto Moravia, author of A Ghost at Noon.

Capri, the island off the coast of Italy where the latter portion of Contempt was filmed, has a history dating back to the classical era. The sirens who tempted Ulysses are said to have lounged about on the grottoes that dot the island. In the latter half of the 19th century, Capri became a popular resort for European artists, writers and other celebrities. Twentieth-century notables including Somerset Maugham, Greta Garbo and Jackie Onassis regularly vacationed there. Graham Greene, author of The Quiet American, had a villa, Il Rosaio, on the island and visited it regularly in the spring and fall for nearly forty years.He wrote portions of several novels there, including The Quiet American. Did Greene and Godard cross paths on Capri during the filming of Contempt? Godards high regard for the film version of The Quiet American might have been a topic of mutual interest, although Greene spoke disparagingly of the film. Curzio Malaparte, the Italian journalist, playwright and novelist, built Casa Malaparte on a rock outcropping on the outskirts of the main village on the island. Did these two writers ever meet? If they did, they might have discussed their shared notoriety both authors wrote novels that were looked upon disapprovingly by the Catholic Church. Alberto Moravia also visited Capri regularly. He was friends with Malaparte. Might he also have met Greene?

The house where the third part of Contempt was filmed was conceived around 1937 by Italian Rationalist architect Adalberto Libera for Curzio Malaparte, and its final design was primarily Malapartes vision. Casa Malaparte was abandoned and neglected after the death of Curzio Malaparte in 1957. It suffered damage from both vandalism and natural elements for many years. Renovation began in the late 1980s. Today the house is used for seminars and cultural events, under the auspices of the Casa Malaparte Foundation. A unique structure, the Casa Malaparte embodies qualities of a fortress, a pagan temple, and an amphitheater. In Contempt, Godard effectively employs Casa Malapartes spectacular location on a promontory overlooking the sea and the theatricality of its grand stairs and roof terrace as the setting for the third act. The buildings questionable ties to the legacy of Fascism (see Adalberto Libera and Curzio Malaparte) only add to the potency of the films narrative.

74

The empty plazas of de Chiricos paintings bear a striking resemblance to the spaces and forms of the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, India. His frolicking horses and melancholy, mannequin-like figures resonate with the characters in Contempt played by Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. As their marriage disintegrates, Paul and Camille devolve from a loving couple to alienated individuals. In his 1968 painting The Return of Ulysses, de Chirico places the hero of The Odyssey in a small boat on a patch of water in a domestic setting instead of on the prow of a sailing ship. This surreal reorientation might well serve as a portrait of the conflicted Ulysses that Paul Javal and Fritz Lang imagine in their discussion of the script for The Odyssey.

The Cinecitt studio complex in southeast Rome was opened by Mussolini in April,1937, with the intention of promoting Italy and the current fascist ideals through cinema. The opening scenes of Contempt were shot at Cinecitt, as were the interiors for The Quiet American. Godard used the empty backlot of the studio as a metaphor for the bankruptcy of the Hollywood studio system. The same year that Godard shot the Cinecitt scenes for Contempt, Joseph Mankiewicz, director of The Quiet American, was shooting Cleopatra at Cinecitt. Though it was ultimately a financially successful picture, Cleopatra nearly bankrupted Twentieth Century Fox studios. Ironically, the postwar Italian neorealist filmmakers, whose work influenced Godards own films, took their cameras to the streets, in part because they were denied access to the Cinecitt facilities.

Director: Jean-Luc GodardProducers: Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti, and Joseph E. LevineScreenplay: Jean-Luc Godard, from the novel Il Disprezzo by Alberto Moravia Photography: Raoul Coutard Assistant Director: Charles Bitsch Editors: Agnes Guillemot and Lila Lakshmanan Sound: William Sivel Music: Georges DelerueCast: Brigitte Bardot (Camile Javal); Michel Piccoli (Paul Javal); Jack Palance (Jerry Prokosch); Georgia Moll (Francesca); Fritz Lang (himself); Jean-Luc Godard (assistant director)

The following description of the film is quoted from Joseph Milicia, Contempt (Le Mpris), International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 1, 4th ed 2001, St. James Press:Le Mpris is the closest Jean-Luc Godard has ever come to making a Hollywood-style film: international stars, relatively big budget, script based upon a prestige novel, glamorous

cinecitt

contemPt

(Le Mpris)

France, 1963

giorgio de chirico

locations shot in color and scope. Of course, it is subversive toward all of the above, and is, among other things, about the absurdities of making a Hollywood-style film. Received with a good deal of puzzlement during its initial release, it was greeted with huge critical acclaim upon its re-release in 1997.

Freely adapting Alberto Moravias Il Disprezzo, Godard tells the story of a writer (Michel Piccoli) who earns the contempt of his wife (Brigitte Bardot) when he appears to pander in more ways than one to an American film producer (Jack Palance). Though an aspiring serious writer, Paul accepts the high-paying job of dumbing down the shooting script of a film of The Odyssey being directed by the venerated Fritz Lang (playing himself), and worse yet, he seems to push his beautiful wife into the philandering producers path. To be sure, nothing is quite so simple as it seems: the rushes we see from Langs film are so bizarrely abstract (and unlike anything the real Lang ever directed) that one may imagine the consternation of even a less crass producer than Jerry Prokosch (Palance); and Pauls crime against his wife is no more tangible than his urging her to go off with Jerry in the latters two-seater to his villa while Paul takes a cab. But Le Mpris is among other things a semioticians delight: Langs footage and Pauls sendoff of his wife in the sports car are signifiers of much else, not to be taken at face value.

Much of Le Mpris is structured upon contrasts of the Classical and the Modern, though what Godard means by classical is complex and partly unorthodox. The Modern is easier to specify: it is Jerrys vulgarity and money-lust, and Pauls neurotic psychologizing over Ulysses motives for leaving Penelope and taking so long to get back to Ithaca. Clearly Paul projects his own confused feelings about his marriage upon the ancient narrative. If Le Mpris were an allegory, Paul and Jerry would be modern parallels for Ulysses and the Suitors; but neither of them cuts a heroic enough figure for the analogy to be much more than a joke. When Jerry hurls a can of film in a fit of anger, inadvertently looking like a discus thrower, Lang dryly remarks, Finally you get the feel of Greek culture.

Lang, the spokesman for the Classical (as Camille is the embodiment), insists that in The Odyssey there are no hidden motives, no tortured dissembling all is starkly forthright. Lang stands for clarity, simplicity, power allied with gracefulness, as his footage with the

76

camera revolving around Greek statues of Poseidon and Athena suggest. In another sense of the term, Godard clearly reveres Lang as a classic both as a filmmaker and as a repository of culture, someone who quotes effortlessly from Dante and Hlderlin.

Godard evokes the Classical in a variety of other ways as well, beginning with Georges Delerues score for the film: stark, somber passages, seemingly tragic in mood, punctuating key moments of the drama, as hieratic as the statues in Langs footage. Equally classical are the Mediterranean vistas so hauntingly photographed in the second half of the film sunburnt rock, splendid blue sea, cloudless or hazy sky. (Rather more eccentrically, Godard alludes to primal matters by emphasizing the primary colors red, yellow, and blue throughout the film, most abstractly in the opening nude shot of Bardot, which uses a red and a blue filter in turn, plus a yellow cloth in the unfiltered portion.) The elegantly gliding tracking shots have their own serene beauty though Godard also uses jump cuts and other ways of disregarding continuity rules of the classical cinema. And the face and unclad body of Bardot are equally treated as classical in their stately beauty. The most famous anecdote about the shooting of Le Mpris has to do with producer Joseph E. Levine demanding that Godard insert footage of a nude Bardot, and Godard complying by opening the film with a long take of his star stretched across the full length of the FranceScope screen, as if to get it over with at once. But in fact her serene nudity is completely integral to the films representation of Bardot, including one close-up as she calmly recites a list of dirty words and shots of her profile in the Rome villa garden. Camille is compared to one of The Odysseys Sirens as well as to Penelope, but rather than lure Paul she literally swims away from him near the end of the film. Finally, her siding with Lang against Paul and Jerry (she even reads a book on Lang in the bathtub) is one more way in which Camille/Bardot is aligned with the Classical. With all of this said, one must still be wary of schematizing a film that has so much of a feel of the improvisatory.

Le Mpris is also very much about the collapse of a marriage. The causes remain obscure, in the sense that the film does not present us with a neat set of reasons, Hollywood-style, for the breakdown. Indeed, Camille impatiently dismisses Pauls supposition of one cause of her anger, his desultory pass at Francesca, Jerrys assistant/translator/mistress. But signs of dissatisfaction, even perhaps clues to deeper problems, are scattered through the film. Most obvious is Pauls slapping Camille (after nastily knocking his hand upon a bronze female torso); more subtle is the sports-car incident (though viewers of today must make a cultural adjustment

to a world in which husbands give permission to wives to be alone with other men). But most often we must draw conclusions from slight variations in tone of voice and body language. All these signs of distance, disagreement, distraction can be observed in the remarkable half-hour scene practically the whole middle third of the film in which the couple pace around their half-finished new apartment, arguing, taking baths in turn, flipping through a book of Roman erotic art which Jerry has given Paul to inspire him, reconciling and then renewing the quarrel, until Camille cries that Paul fills her with contempt (and Delerues tragic music bursts out to accompany her). Godards restless FranceScope camera records all this, mostly in long shot, often down corridors or through doorways, and most famously tracking back and forth between them as they sit separated by a lamp which Paul flips impatiently on and off.

In countless ways, Godard interrogates not just a marriage but the cinema itself. Here come into play his explicit homages to classic American filmmaking (most amusingly when Paul wears his hat in the bathtub to look like Dean Martin in Some Came Running) and at the same time his disregard of the rules of continuity editing and conventional motivation. Certain plot developments Paul grabbing a gun but never using it, the unexpected auto crash at the end seem more like allusions to Hollywood melodrama than integral parts of the film. Le Mpris begins with a shot of Raoul Coutards camera tracking toward us and peering down at us as we peer up at it, while a voice reads not only the credits (as Orson Welles does at the end of The Magnificent Ambersons) but also a statement about the nature of cinema. In the last shot Lang is still shooting The Odyssey, with Godard himself now playing an assistant director shouting Silence! as the camera tracks past the shoot to gaze out at the empty horizon. Godard also plays games with the soundtrack: for example, when our characters talk to one another during a concert, the loud music does not just drop in volume, as convention dictates it drops out entirely.

Godards cinematographer on Contempt, Coutard spent 11 years (1945-1956) in Indochina as a war photographer. His collaboration with filmmaker Pierre Schoendoerffer, who was a cameraman and correspondent in Vietnam from 1954 to 1956, led to his work with Godard on Breathless. Coutard, who appears in the opening and closing scenes of Contempt, might well have reminisced with Giorgia Moll about their experiences in Vietnam while they were together on the set of Contempt. He could also have encouraged Paul/Michel to visit Vietnam after the shoot had finished.

rAoul coutArd

78

The composer of the elegiac score for Contempt, Delerue wrote the music for approximately 320 films and television programs between 1950 and 1992, including music for films by other Nouvelle Vague directors such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Melville.

Just as Ulysses loses his bearings in the course of his journey, so Paul Javal, Michel Piccolis character in Contempt, becomes disoriented emotionally, and perhaps morally, as his relationship with Camille disintegrates. Disorientation is central to the film and to the Contempt Mandala project as well. Casa Malaparte, in one instance, is set afloat and, in another, sent careening off a cliff. In the paintings done by Harish Chandra Sain as well as in an animated sequence in the video, the Great Prakash Yantra is lofted into the starry night sky. The monolithic Narivalaya Uttar Gola Yantra is likewise wrested from its foundation and thrown heavenwards to tumble in an arc across the room and across the screen. The figure of Ulysses in the de Chirico homage is drawn in a fashion that alienates him from the surreal tableau of the original. Paul/Michel Piccolis disorientation and ultimate disappearance into the labyrinth of Saigon is the subject of the final chapter of the video for the Contempt Mandala project.

Godard cast Giorgia Moll as the multilingual secretary Francesca in Contempt, using her character as a means of dealing with the potential problems of dubbing the film for foreign distribution. Moll has a substantial role, which consists almost entirely of translating conversations among the American producer, the German director and the French scriptwriter so that they can understand each other. Moll had previously played the part of an interpreter/translator as Phuong, a Vietnamese woman, in The Quiet American (1958). Although she never speaks anything but English, the audience is led to assume that she is conversant in French and, of course, Vietnamese. In both films the role Moll plays serves as a plot device. In Contempt she is a distraction for Paul, a device for revealing the disorientation he experiences as his relationship with Camille disintegrates. In The Quiet American she is a symbol for the country over which old Europe and young America are fighting. Michael Redgrave, in the role of a British correspondent, is a proxy for the French overlords. Audie Murphys character is clearly emblematic of the brash, confident neocolonial American project. Giorgia Molls roles in the two films form the bridge between Capri and Saigon. It is Giorgia/Francescas (imagined) conversation with Michel/Paul about her experiences on the set of The Quiet American in Vietnam that inspires his journey to Saigon in Contempt Mandala.

frAncescA/Phuong

disorientAtion, destAbilAZition

And disPlAcement

georges delerue

JeAn-luc godArd

helen of troy

the indiAn ePic

First published in 1955, the novel Il Disprezzo by Alberto Moravia was the inspiration for Godards 1963 film Le Mpris (Contempt). The characters names are different Emilia (Camille), Ricardo (Paul), Battista (Prokosch) and Rheingold (Fritz Lang) but the book begins with the same scene that sets the plot in motion in Contempt: the red car. Godard compresses the time encompassed by the novel, trims the cast of characters and changes locations, but essentially remains true to Moravias story of the making of a film and the unraveling of a relationship.

Jean-Luc Godard is a French filmmaker and one of the most influential members of the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave. In addition to his film Le Mpris acting as the centerpiece of the Contempt Mandala project, his engagement with the politics of Vietnam (a former French colony) is one of the coincidences underpinning the Capri/Saigon axis in Contempt Mandala. In 1958, Godard wrote an essay in Cahiers du Cinma about The Quiet American. He also addressed the Vietnam conflict in his films Pierrot le Fou (1967) and La Chinoise (1967), in his segment of Loin du Vietnam (1967), and in Letter to Jane (1972).

Contempt was not Brigitte Bardots first encounter with the work of Homer. In 1956 she played the role of Andraste, a handmaiden to Rossana Podestas Helen, in the lavishly filmed epic about the Trojan War based on Homers Iliad. Due to her subsequent fame, her name often leads the cast list. Her part, however, was small. She appeared in three or four scenes of the epic.

Fritz Lang long had a fascination with India. Lang directed The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (collectively referred to as The Indian Epic, 1959-60), which were shot in Germany and on location in north India. Langs Orientalist spectacle followed two earlier versions done in 1921 and 1938, respectively. A co-production of Germany and France, the Lang film earned box office-related state subsidies for its French producer Grard Beytout, who used the money to bankroll bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) by critic-turned-first-time director Jean-Luc Godard. It is Langs experience in Rajasthan, where The Indian Epic was shot, that is the basis for his (imagined) suggestion to Paul/Michel that he travel to India when he leaves Capri in the final scene of Contempt.

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A ghost At noon

(Il Disprezzo)

In June of 1967, the beginning of The Summer of Love, I went to Jaipur, Rajasthan, The Pink City. I spent the next year there teaching English at Rajasthan College, studying Rajasthani painting at a school founded by Kirpal Singh on the grounds of the maharajas palace, and taking sitar lessons from a very young Krishnamohan Bhatt, who went on to collaborate with minimalist composer Terry Riley. My roommate at 20 Gangwal Park was Paul Tate, a fellow Fulbright scholar/teacher who was studying Hindi and Indian philosophy. We celebrated our Jaipur experiences in the first of several collaborations, His Holiness Gives an Example, a transcript of an extended conversation fueled by hashish and memory. Jaipur is Paul Jarval/Michel Piccolis imagined destination when he leaves Capri in the last scene of the film.

On my first day in India, jet-lagged after a flight from New York, I arose early, eager to explore New Delhi with my fellow Fulbright scholars. After breakfast we walked out into the still cool morning. Our first encounter with India was the Delhi Jantar Mantar, which was located in a park directly across from the YMCA where we were staying. Maharaja Jai Sing II built five observatories. The Jantar Mantar in New Delhi was the model for the one in Jaipur, the town in which I spent the next year.

The observatory in Jaipur consists of 14 major geometric devices for measuring time, predicting eclipses, tracking stars in their orbits, ascertaining the declinations of planets, and determining the celestial altitudes. Each is a fixed and focused tool. Built of local stone and marble, each instrument carries an astronomical scale, generally marked on the marble inner lining. The instruments are in most cases huge structures. They are built on a large scale so that accuracy of readings can be obtained. The samrat yantra, for instance, which is a sundial, can be used to tell the time to an accuracy of about two seconds in Jaipur local time. I visited the Jantar Mantar several times while living in Jaipur between 1967and 1968, as well as on subsequent trips to India. In 2003, on my most recent visit to Jaipur, I did a series of ink drawings based on the geometry of the Great Prakash Yantra. These became the basis for the paintings I commissioned Harish Chandra Sain to do for Contempt Mandala. The Narivalaya Uttar Gola Yantra, another instrument, is the model for the black marble sculpture done by Padam Chand Sharma for this project. I also imagined a screening of Contempt set in the Jantar Mantar. This was the basis for a painting in the Contempt Mandala installation done by Ajay Solanki. At one time I considered the idea of gathering a group of artists whose work exhibited an

JAiPur

JAntAr mAntAr

AnnA KArinA

lAbyrinth

fritZ lAng

affinity for the geometry, scale and purpose of the Jantar Mantar for a seminar. I thought about inviting Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Frank Stella and Robert Smithson to Jaipur. This idea never got beyond having Harish paint representative images of their work. The similarities between the space and the structures of the Jantar Mantar and de Chiricos anxious and empty plazas also intrigued me, ultimately leading me to incorporate several references to his work in Contempt Mandala.

The actress, who was married to Godard between 1961 and 1967, is widely considered to be the model for Camille. In one scene, Bardot dons a dark wig cut in a pageboy style clearly reminiscent of Karinas hairstyle. This purposeful conflation of art and life, of actors and the characters they play, of fact and invention, is also central to the Contempt Mandala project.

The city-as-labyrinth (per Walter Benjamin) is the Saigon in which Paul/Michel disappears. Labyrinths have historically been used both in group ritual and for private meditation. Prehistoric labyrinths are believed to have served as traps for malevolent spirits or as defined paths for ritual dances. Labyrinths can also be thought of as symbolic forms of pilgrimage. Labyrinths are used by modern mystics to help achieve a contemplative state. Walking among the turnings, one loses track of direction and of the outside world, and this quiets the mind. The result is a relaxed mental attitude, free of internal dialog. This is a form of meditation. The voice-over that opens Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad is heard (in English translation) at the beginning of The Poetic Geography of Saigon (discarded), a video-element of the Contempt Mandala project, as the camera follows the wanderings of an unidentified woman through a labyrinthine building. The monologue was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose novel In the Labyrinth is another point of departure for Paul/Michels journey through the streets of Saigon in Contempt Mandala.

Fritz Lang plays a German director named Fritz Lang in Contempt. Friedrich Christian Anton Fritz Lang (18901976) was an Austrian-German-American film director, screenwriter, and occasional film producer. Lang embodied the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director epitomized by Eric von Stroheim and Otto Preminger. Lang even wore a monocle, which added to the stereotype. His character in Godards film, however, is a realist without illusions about the movie-making business. He is at once empathetic and removed.

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Adalberto Libera (19031963), drafted the first iteration of the plan for Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri (1938), although there is continuing controversy as to whether Libera or Malaparte himself was the main designer. Libera is known primarily for his modernist buildings designed for Mussolinis Fascist regime during the 1930s. Two of his most important works, the Palace of Congress and the Palace of Civilization, can be seen in Romes EUR district. The faade of the latter building, with its regular ranks of unadorned arches, bears a significant resemblance to the architecture that frames the empty plazas of de Chiricos classic paintings.

Curzio Malaparte (18981957), an Italian journalist, playwright, novelist and diplomat, designed the Casa Malaparte, which he called a house like me. Malaparte was at one time a fascist agitator. Later he was exiled by Mussolini for his attacks against Hitler and the fascist party. The contradictions of his colorful career are reflected in the design of Casa Malaparte. The exterior, which has the austerity of the fascist architecture, contrasts with the interior, which is executed in a rather ordinary Capriote style. The grand staircase, a defining characteristic of Casa Malaparte, was copied from a small church, and yet the building has more of the quality of a pagan altar.

A mandala is a generic term for any plan, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically, a microcosm of the universe. Mandalas represent wholeness and can be seen as models for the structure of life itselfcosmic diagrams that remind us of our relation to the infinite, the world that extends both beyond and within our bodies and minds. The mandala appears in all aspects of life: in the orbits of the earth, sun and moon, as well as in conceptual circles of friends, family and community. The circle with a center pattern is the basic structure of the natural world. It is a pattern seen in biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. Like the labyrinth, the mandala is used as a tool for centering. In various spiritual traditions (Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Native American) the mandala may be employed for focusing attention of aspirants and adepts, as a spiritual teaching tool, for establishing a sacred space, and as an aid to meditation and trance induction. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung saw the mandala as a representation of the unconscious self. Mandalas are typically radially symmetrical. Located at the center of the mandala is the deity, site or experience that is the axis on which the depicted cosmos turns. Casa Malaparte, the site of the dissolution of Paul and Camilles marriage, is at the

Adelberto liberA

curZio mAlAPArte

mAndAlA

center of the mandala table in the Contempt Mandala installation. The center point is a site of instability and change rather than a place of rest and return. The cosmos I have composed in Contempt MandalaCapri, Jaipur, Saigonhovers uneasily between myth and reality, the original and the appropriated, the expressive and the formal, the universal and the personal. Over the time that I have been engaged with this project, I have become increasingly accepting of the turbulence and unpredictability that I believe are at the center of life, at least my life.

Author of A Ghost at Noon (Il Disprezzo), the novel that was the source for Contempt, Moravia was one of the leading Italian novelists of the 20th century. He is best known for his anti-fascist novel Il Conformista (The Conformist), the basis for the film The Conformist (1970) by Bernardo Bertolucci, and La Ciociara, filmed by Vittorio de Sica as Two Women (1960). Two Women was produced by Carlo Ponti, one of the producers of Contempt. Moravia visited Capri regularly and was a friend of Curzio Malaparte.

More than either Bardot or Piccoli, each of whom had only a passing acquaintance with sword-and-sandal epics, Jack Palance had the dubious reputation of starring in two of the better-known epics of the mid50s: The Silver Chalice (1954) and Sign of the Pagan (1954). He was also featured in The Barbarians (1960) and The Mongols (1961). These roles probably informed his Jeremy Prokosch, the crude and arrogant American producer who urges director Fritz Lang to put more sex and action into his version of the Odyssey.

A subheading of a chapter in the book Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature, by Panivong Norindr, the phrase became the title of a chapter in the video that ultimately took on a life of its own, independent of the Contempt Mandala project. In the chapter Geographic Romance, Norindr discusses the transgressive wanderings of the young woman who is the main character of Marguerite Duras LAmant (The Lover). Norindrs analysis, was the source for the structure of The Poetic Geography of Saigon video, which, in its final form, became the anxious wanderings of Paul/Michel Piccoli in the last chapter of the Contempt Mandala video. I employ Norindrs description of what he calls errancy, swerving both from the path and from truthas deviation or perversionand wandering from one place to another, an accidental journey more than a

Alberto morAviA

JAcK PAlAnce

the Poetic geogrAPhy of sAigon

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process of forced displacement, as a means of relocating the wanderings of Benjamins flaneur from France to Vietnam, thereby setting the stage for Paul Javal/Michel Piccolis final disappearance into the labyrinth of Saigon.

Carlo Ponti, along with Joseph Levine and Georges de Beauregard, was a producer of Contempt. Jack Palances depiction of the crass and insensitive producer Jeremy Prokosch, was, if not inspired by Ponti himself, certainly directed at what Ponti, Levine, and de Beauregard, the old guard, the establishment, represented for Godard, this despite the fact that Ponti had produced other Godard films as well as films by Antonioni. Ponti at one point attempted to pressure Godard to cast Sophia Loren (Pontis wife) in the role of Camille. He also considered Kim Novak for the role.

Martin Scorsese has said about Contempt, Its also one of the greatest films ever made about the actual process of filmmaking. Like the film, the Contempt Mandala project is also about process. Shots appropriated from the film are intercut with shots taken in my studio. Ideas migrate from two-dimensional images to three-dimensional forms and back again. The catalog for Contempt Mandala contains images of alternate versions of existing pieces of the project as well as unrealized components. I also use the catalog to revisit Godards film, exploring relocations of the narrative and modifications of the set. Just as Langs film-within-the-film is unfinished at the end of Contempt, so this project remains open-ended.

I saw The Quiet American in 1958, the year that it premiered, at a theater in East Lansing, Michigan, across the street from the campus of Michigan State University. In the audience were colleagues of my father who were participants in MSUs project in Vietnam. At least one of them could be seen in a crowd scene in the film. A year later, I was on my way to Saigon. The Quiet American was the first film adaptation of Graham Greenes bestselling novel. The film, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Audie Murphy, Michael Redgrave and Giorgia Moll, was well received critically, though not considered a box-office success. Set in Saigon in the early 1950s, during the end of the First Indochina War, it portrays two concurrent conflicts: one, a romantic triangle involving a veteran British journalist, Thomas Fowler; a young American, Alden Pyle; and Fowlers Vietnamese mistress, Phuong; the other involving the political turmoil and growing American involvement that led to the Vietnam War.

cArlo Ponti

Process

the quiet AmericAn

Contempt Mandala relocates Godards narrative in a hybrid space and time that is Italy/India/Vietnam of the 1950s/60s and the present. The editing strategy of the Contempt Mandala video uses formal correspondences to establish believable transitions from Capri to Jaipur, Saigon to Cinecitt. The addition of a Vietnamese tourist painting and images from Harish Chandra Sains paintings to my version of de Chiricos The Return of Ulysses removes the site of the heros return beyond de Chiricos domestic setting and yet another step from Ithaca. In the gouache paintings, the astronomical instruments of the Jantar Mantar are relocated from terra firma into the heavens. The mandala table is also depicted as moving from Capri to Jaipur to Saigon.

French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet was one of the authors most closely associated with the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel. His writings, particularly the novel Jealousie and his screenplay for La Dernier Annee A Marienbad. inform both the narratives that open the catalogue and the Contempt Mandala video. Robbe-Grillets fractured plots and timelines as well as his repetitive descriptions and eschewing of the psychology and interiority of his characters are an appropriate match for the Paul/Michel character whose odyssey is a journey apparently devoid of self reflection.

I lived in Saigon, once known as The Paris of the Orient and now called Ho Chi Minh City, from 1959 to1961. My father, a professor of forensic science at Michigan State University, was involved in police training and the modernizing of the citys crime laboratory. He supervised the autopsy on one of the first Americans killed in Vietnam. I spent my junior and senior years of high school at the American Community School with classmates who were military brats, children of diplomats from Europe and Asia, and the sons and daughters of government contractors. I fell in love for the first time in Saigon. I had my first sexual experiences there. I read Howl, On the Road and The Stranger, and wrote my first poetry there as well. My interest in art was awakened in Saigon. After a failed experience as a student of a Vietnamese impressionist artist, I set up a studio for myself in a vacant room in the servants quarters of the colonial villa my family lived in and began copying paintings by Jackson Pollock and Adolph Gottlieb. A traveling exhibition of contemporary French painting at the French embassy and books on Stuart Davis and Willem de Kooning set me on a course that I continue to follow today. Late-night glimpses (riding home on my Lambretta from waterfront bars) of the towers of a Hindu temple piqued my interest in the arts of Asia and led, ultimately, to my teaching

relocAtion

sAigon

AlAin robbe-grillet

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career, which is balanced between studio courses and art history. The legacy of those two years in Saigon has occupied much of my practice since then.

With a 30-year background of studio work inspired by my high school years in Vietnam, it is not surprising that when I returned to Saigon in 1990 my experience was that of Benjamins flaneur (see The Arcades Project) and Duras protagonist in The Lover. The places that harbor memory are reconfigured by the act of memory. Memory is something scattered everywhere. In these novels [Duras] sets Saigon as a metaphoric space, one that transforms the literal Saigon of urban planners and geographers into a poetic urban text, determined by the wanderings of a young girl. (Panivong Norindr, Phantasmatic Indochina, Duke University Press, 1996) The Saigon into which Paul/Michel disappears is the city of the flaneur and the wandering adolescent, but it is also Ho Chi Minh City, a metropolis of high-rises under construction, Internet cafes and a globalizing economy. It is a disorienting, anxious city, a hybrid of past and present, capitalism and socialism.

A painter of traditional Rajasthani miniature paintings working in Jaipur, Harish did all of the gouache-on-handmade-paper paintings for the project.

A sculptor working in Jaipur, Padam carved the marble model of the Narivalaya Uttar Gola Yantra (astronomical instrument). His workshop typically produces figurative sculptures of Hindu deities.

A painter working in Jaipur, Ajay had a studio that produced hand-painted hordings (cinema posters) for local theaters. He painted the canvas advertising an imagined screening of Contempt at the Jantar Mantar. He is now retired, due in part to the replacement of hand-painted posters by digital imagery.

hArish chAndrA sAin

PAdAm chAnd shArmA

AJAy solAnKi

I have been interested in synchronicity/coincidence since 1972, when I began documenting coincidences that happened to me, my family and friends. An openness to the random, the unexpected has become the backbone of my studio practice. It is also the primary organizational strategy for Contempt Mandala. Giorgia Molls roles as Francesca and Phuong; the formal similarities of the architecture of Casa Malaparte, the structures at the Jantar Mantar and de Chiricos empty piazzas; Godards championing of The Quiet Americanthese are all examples of coincidences, or what Lawrence Weschler, in his book Everything That Rises, refers to as convergences.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner but are causally unrelated. In order to be synchronous, the events must be related to one another conceptually, and the chance that they would occur together randomly must be very small. Synchronous events may reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework which encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems which display the synchronicity. Recognition of coincidence places one, momentarily, at the center of an acausal cosmos. Where before there was chaos, now there is order. Each subsequent deployment of synchronicity reinforces this precarious position. Whether coincidences are glimpses of an underlying acausal principle or simply a manifestation of the human impulse to make sense of existence, the recognition of coincidence locates one at the midpoint of a constellation of events, much like being in the center of a mandala.

A misogynist French saying proclaims, Translations are like wives, the beautiful are not faithful and the faithful are not beautiful. Contempt is a film about, among other things, translation. The history of the Odyssey (the film-within-the-film) is itself a story of translation and adaptation. Homer is traditionally depicted as a blind minstrel wandering from place to place, reciting poems that had come down to him from a very old oral tradition. Homer may have used earlier writings to help him, or he could have dictated his poems to someone else because of his blindness or because he was illiterate. Many scholars believe that the books of Homers Odyssey as they exist today were not written by a single person and were not put in writing until centuries after they took their present form. The original Greek texts were ultimately translated into numerous languages, including Italian. Alberto Moravia may have used the Italian translation in his research for his novel A Ghost at Noon. Godard probably consulted the French translation during the course of his preparation for Contempt. Given

trAnslAtion

synchronicity

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the sword-and-sandal epics that Palance, Bardot, Moll and Piccoli had all appeared in, they may have read translations as well. Godard translates Moravias novel into a film. He also translates Homers Odyssey into a film within Contempt. In that film, we see shots of statues of the Greek gods, a translation from written form to three-dimensional form, as well as contemporary actors playing Penelope and Ulysses, a translation from static to active forms.

The Italians say traduttore traditorea translator is a traitor. The French version of this is traduire est detruiretranslation is destruction. The primary function of Giorgia Molls character, Francesca, is to translate and interpret. She translates from English to French for her boss, Jeremy Prokosch, and then from French to English when either Paul or Camille speaks to Prokosch. The importance of translation is highlighted in an incident in the screening room at Cinecitt when Fritz Lang quotes the German poet Friedrich Hlderlin and discusses the finer points of the translation with Francesca. In her role as Phuong in The Quiet American, Giorgia Moll also serves as a translator/interpreter. Although the films script is exclusively English, Moll functions as an intermediary between east and west and between the Americans, British, French and Vietnamese.

The hero of the Odyssey, Ulysses is the prototypical wanderer. Paul Javal is the ambivalent Ulysses of Contempt. Ulysses journey is the inspiration for Paul/Michels imagined odyssey from Capri to Jaipur and Saigon in Contempt Mandala.

sources:McDonough, Michael, Malaparte, A House Like Me, Clarkson Potter, New 1999.

Norindr, Panivong, Phantasmatic Indochina, French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature,

Duke University Press, Durham NC 1996.

Russo, William, A Thinkers Damn, Audie Murphy, Vietnam, and The Making of The Quiet American, XLibris 2001.

Volwahsen, Andreas, Cosmic Architecture in India, Prestel, Munch, 2001.

Wikipedia

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i must hAve hAd A long sleeP for when i AwoKe the stArs were shining down on

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