Hans Bellmer, Whitechapel London

20 September - 19 November 2006

There is a man talking very loudly about 'the banality of golfers' and people who practice hitting balls 'with a stick'. We're in the gallery and you've got to wonder why (I can hear him).

The exhibition handout states that Hans Bellmer 'defied the Fascist state in which he lived by withdrawing from any socially useful activity'. That would account for all the unrelenting sexual references then. Not a disturbed psyche but a politically motivated gesture. According to the Whitechapel, allusions to the body caught-in-the-act and nudity-with-socks-on was 'a powerful tool for social critique in 1964. And there is a list of eminent names to support the continuing value of the work that 'offered an opportunity to a complacent bourgeois, judgmental approach to the world': Deleuze, Foucault, Bataille, Balzac ... but I'm tired of it already ...

In 1964 my dad was trying to earn a living in London, too busy (he frequently recounts) even to listen to The Beatles. An aspiring refugee and (forever) outsider. Yet, I also know he discovered sex (almost for the first time) in that year and was enjoying himself whenever he could (wife and new child allowing/permitting). So it would seem to me at least, that 'bourgeois' or 'aspirant working class' are not opposing terms to 'the body' and sexual exploration. This is one of those myths about the only true opposition is the kind that comes from the outside and is only ever generated by the intentional outsider.

Then I think to myself, 'I'm too tired to think about sex'. It seems like a luxury right now, to fully exercise a libido without restraint. When you're working hard within the system, it can feel beyond the realms of fantasy to get naked (but leave your socks on). So I would like to suggest that any opposing terms that might be at work here are actually 'sex' and 'the working body'. Also, I'm reminded that those operating (supposedly) on 'the outside' only get to be subversive (actually) by virtue of those working on 'the inside'. How fortunate for Bellmer that the busy bourgeoisie found themselves unable to dedicate themselves, wholeheartedly, to the fulfiment of sexual desires ... erm ... to the project of undermining 'socially useful activity'.

Make a doll and take her to a wood, find a body and bind the breasts and thighs. Take some photographs. Feel something. Show something. What's everyone else doing? Not this?! They're too busy being bourgeois to be following 'an obsessive quest for a monstrous dictionary dedicated to the ambivalence of the body'.

And anyway, who says 'body'? I see only women. And tits and shoes and stockings and tights. Is it, rather, that we are witnessing a vast array of images that reveal the ambivalences of the aesthetic 'eye'; at turns all-seeing or omnipotent, voyeuristic, formalist ...

I enjoyed the exhibition in many ways. However I'm not convinced: Victorian 'retro' legs in stripy tights does not a philosophy make.