text_po_box - barbara nahmad

The diary-novel, confession, autobiography or simply narrative text by Catherine Millet, the art critic and editor of the Paris-based journal Art Press, brilliantly takes the lid off the vices and virtues of the prominent figures in her microcosm - and it does so through the magnifying glass of her sex life. A fundamental part of our passion for art is naturally to be found in vision: artists, critics and collectors are all voyeurs whose eye is trained by skill and knowledge, as well as by fairly shrewd attitudes obtained through the study of Bataille and Klossowski, who nurture an obsession for capturing hidden details, concealed images, forbidden urges. Admiring art in museums or galleries is thus not all that different from going to a peepshow, visiting pornographic websites or getting aroused in front of a keyhole. Art has always exhibited nudity and proffered images stolen from sex: it is a stimulation of the senses and a cultural justification for voyeurism. What appears significant in Millet's book is a complete absence of eroticism, in favour of pornography pure and simple. While eroticism is permissible and adopted as a model of behaviour, pornography is criminalized as a vice, aimed at an uncultured public of perverts - certainly not the blasé circles of art. Eroticism plays by twisting in on itself, while pornography admits no delay: just like in horror films, pornography uses the plot as no more than a break - a rest - between one murder and another, one screw and the next. A further stimulus and modern aspect of this essay-novel is the total absence of moralising, whether positive or negative, concerning sex. Millet's first-person narrator is a machine at work, one who has no intention of settling scores on behalf of her gender or of society, one who makes no distinction between right behaviour and wrong, but simply describes what she does as though observing herself from afar. I don't know if one could justify reading this book from the point of view of female sexuality, since I really do not know what this means. I think, on the other hand, that it would be the ideal subject for a film by the italian director Tinto Brass, a great narrator in images of the body beautiful and of the joie de vivre of sex beyond all ethics.