Essay from Nissen's Voluptuario, published by Saint Martin's Press, New York 1966

CUNNING STUNTS

CARLOS FUENTES

Pornography literally means the description of our debauche. But what is literal in the world of symbolic forms? A letter is a litter after Joyce brings words the same cunning ambivalence and stunrung corporeality we happily associate with the sexual act. Words and sexes are no longer literal: verb and body are subjected to constant metamorphosis. Do we come out of this wiser but sadder?

Cunning stunts leaves us to. re-Joyce in Sade-ness: Brian; Nissen's couplings of images are like a gigantic erotic pun, a vast web of allusions where multiple meaning of body and language, stasis and change, come together tied by the knot of sexual description, only to see each knot untied the instant it is fastened, incessantly liberating further meanings: a constellation of images.

We are separated from the stunning cunts and the treacherous pricks by the cunning stunts and the 1echerous tricks of the artist: We see but cannot touch these bodies. Like the fruits and the water of Tantalus, forever within his reach, forever receding from his grasp. ...

We can touch only paper and ink. Yet we do touch the image; Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar sees mind as skin: A skin touched, seen, remembered. This is true of Brian Nissen's art: the cunning stunt is that we may not physically touch the stunning-cunt, but we can possess it as it too possesses our mind, touches our mind, sees it and tells our mind: You, too,are skin.

The picture comes forward to posses us. Nissen asks: Are we ready for this? Must we always be the macho spectator who first sees the work of art, sets a price, and then, only then, unzips his mental fly, brings out his psychic trick and says, O.K., I will now have her, I will now rape her and ape her and tape her and gape her and nape her and lape her, whether she wants to or not. The macho spectator of the cunning art will even take his bonded cuntcubine to his creasoikonic harem, show her off, and one day sell her at a profit. She has passed on. She has never reached out to touch her sultan. He believes he has possessed her.

Swat that fly!

From Altamira to Velazquez to Duchamp the cunning stunter asks us to enter the painting only if the painting can simultaneously enter us: this is the bargain.

The bull in Altamira can only be had if we accept to share the arena with him: act out a common scene in a common place, a meeting place of bravery and fear. With him: even be gored.

Ortegay Gasset saw in Las Meninas a double dynamic of the painting coming to us as we go to it. Are we willing to be the erotic objects of the infanta as well as her dwarf, of the dueña as well as the gentleman waiting in the staircase on the yellow rectangle by the door? Are we willing to see the painter's brush spring hard and bushy between his legs, asking us to pay the price of our pleasure: possessing the painting only if we are possessed by it? Are we willing to appear in the mirror of the painting between the King and Queen who sired the infanta who is the subject of the painting within the painting, creating the stunning cuntfusion of a ménage a trois, ménage a droit, ménage a troz, manage at Roy's, mangez a Troyes, le ménage a Troie n aura pas lieu.

Brush your teeth with it.

Spinning, spunning,: Spanish, spunish stunts: a punished trick, a tarnished prick. The nude descends the staircase towards us; her moving skin is touching, is thinking, is changing like the serpent's, just for us. She comes renewed as the Spring. We embrace her. She is another: Under her woman's skin, she is the goddess of metamorphoses, Our Lord Xipe Totec, the Aztec divinity of the flayed skin. Wait for the next movement: He will be She again Tlazolteotl, the lady vulture, the goddess who purifies the world as she devours its filth. Are we ready for him? Are we ready for her? This is Nissen's question.

Touch it. Do not touch it. It is beautiful. But it is dead.

Are we ready for death? Lovers and children do not fear death because death is the only place where they can be together. Their forbidden childhood and their forbidden passion have eluded them throughout life Death becomes more than their destiny: it is their only chance, it is their unity recovered, disguised as death.

Bury it. Save it from the animal's hunger.

Spinning stunts: The best works of art, said the surrealist, are imperfect, because they leave much to be desired. Quote W.Blake: "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence." Brian Nissen offers us a multiple vision of desire. The perfection of its form is its imperfection: his art does not consciously aspire to permanence, if this be the sign of perfection: It will last.

Blake once more: "Eternity is in love with the works of time." And Quevedo: "Only what is passing remains and lasts." The permanence of Nissen's art is staked on its impermanence; it depends on the margin left open for desire to occupy. This margin is greater in some works than in others. In the case of Nissen, it is actively expressed by an aesthetic and moral attitude: This is passing. What passes is passion. It moves. It desires. Step in.

I see these figures acting out their cunning stunts and rapidly moving from pornography to sexuality to the erotic: rapidly leaving behind the descriptive [pornographic] or reproductive [sexual] and entering the erotic [supernatural]. The erotic passage towards death without the renunciation of desire: Eros.

The movement in Nissen's figures stirs the stagnant air of the pornographic; it also poisons the blessed air of the reproductive or creative or revolutionary: con bendit!, to con a phrase: coño es caño: coño es ceño: en ceño coño: coño es signo, segno, sign, sine, sigh: signing cunts, sunning cunts, cunning signs, cunning suns, sighing cunts.

Here's a cuntfidence: Nissen celebrates desire but is not duped by it. For desire, whose suppression breeds (blakish) (brakish) pestilence, it is not a song of innocence: We desire in order to suppress the difference between ourselves and the other, between the subject and the object of desire. But this drive towards unity also contains the seeds of alterity and the dangers of submission, enslavement, possession: We want to change the object of our desire. To make it our-self. To suppress the difference between ourself and the other.

The body and the desire to make the impossible possible: to make one of two: Androgyny. To re-unite again and to fail constantly in the attempt, because the object might resist our desire, or act as our subject and desire us more than we desire (or wish to be desired by) it. The permutations become infinite: We must choose erotically between the desire for the desire of unity or the desire for the desire of alterity.

Roller skate towards it.

The Romantic chooses: Let us be whole again. The Orphan accepts: Let us be several again. Modern art is forever posed between the nostalgia of analogy and the temptation of diversity.

The eroticism of Brian Nissen is polycultural: an English artist in the Indo-Iberianworld, dealing with desire, discovers that freedom and necessity are not at odds with one another. He carries his individualistic Anglo-Saxon freedom into a world of dark collective necessity and in the lands of necessity (Mexico, Spain) he discovers that the freedom of the subject consists in transforming him/her/self to reach its object, an object that materially is forbidden it. This is certainly the strongest and perhaps the most positive tradition of the Indo-Iberian world: it suffuses popular art, painting, and writing with an urgency that it would not have if the desire could be materially accomplished. Since it cannot, we, he, the figure we now see, must leap, execute a triple somersault over the chasm separating the shore of desire from the shore of its accomplishment.

Tie a balloon to it. Tie it to a balloon.

A triple somersault, a jump over the void, the mortal danger of desire: Brian Nissen generously extends a safety net below the prancing figures of sex and death, one and other, passage and passion; this net is called fun and games, humor, the ludicrous. In sex as in carnival, time is suspended; nothing exists, nothing happens, outside the concentrated hijinks on a bed. The same bed on which one day we shall throw back our head and see no more, feel no more.

See it fly away with the balloon. It has fallen up. Skyvity. Gravair.

Perception tells me that the earth is flat. Humor and imagination tell me the earth is round. Who wins? The balloon.

Nissen's game saves the body thanks to ludicrous representation. Here it is, for one fulfilling instant, joyous, but clownish, rejoycing at the wake, cunning stunt, penis ceiling, dire trick, spinning, spunning spunished games: forbidden because, as Luis Buñuel used to say, sex without sin is like an egg without salt.

Brian Nissen and I have shared a great affection for Luis Buñuel: The man and his work. We recall a terrible scene from the film EL where the hero, deranged by jealousy, enters his wife's room armed with rope, chloroform, cotton, thread and needle. She is about to be closed: cuntdemned. Her body will not be open to anyone any more.

Your show of shows, choose your own sign: No entrance. No exit. Or S.R.O.?

The sewing up of a body is one of the perversions described by Sade in the 120 days of Sodom. No entrance or no exit? Catalysis is the flooding of the body, the occupation of all the erogenous zones in one simultaneous event. Juan Goytisolo shows me a marquee in a porno movie house on the Boulevard de Clichy in Paris. Its title is Quick, Quick, Plug my Five Holes. Does this lady know any arithmetic?

For Plotinus, we only know what God is not, never what he is. Therefore the body is a way of knowing God because he is not that. The Cathari heretics tried to rid themselves of their bodies, which they saw not as a creation of God himself but of a second, evil God: The God who gave us what He is Not. This Satanic deity charged us with the body, encumbered us with the negation of the soul and dared us to exhaust, to drain this material horror so as to become pure souls. Never has a more perfect justification for erotica pleasure been devised: every sexual act becomes a renunciation, a penitence, a cuntegorical imperative (Immanuel Kunt). But since only death will truly exhaust the possibilities of the body, the Albigensian heresy is demanding its own demise, calling forth the exterminating crusade against Albi. The sensual, perhaps even gracious, piecemeal liberation of the soul through the sexual exhaustion of the body will now be offered in one apocalyptic swipe. The body of the Cathari tree is dead. It has been killed by History: Histery: His Story: Hiss Starry.

Balance the Encyclopedia Britannica on it.

Nuns in colonial Mexico bared their backs and breasts and had their servant girls whip them and call them sacks of excrement, tubes of shit, bags of corruption. Turn that page and see Brian Nissen three centuries later, substituting the ceremony of sin for the ceremony of fun: The channel of corruption has become the stream of humor, the safety net of both excessive reason and excessive faith, the Erasmian praise of folly that renders both the madness of faith and the madness of reason relative: look at these balancing acts in the Nissean concilium, in Brian's circus of the circuts of play saving our bodies from the extremes of cuntdemnation and cuntversion: Brian's circunts, Nissen's cuntcilium: tied pricks, balancing acts, floating games, Siamese sex, boxing balls, jocula, risa, laughter, rire; pranks; sex sucks!

Stop laughing. Are we ready for death? Behind every cunning stunt and lecherous lick and dreadful trick in the Nissen book of erotica, lies a cadaver. The headiest motivation of the sexual conjunction [Octavio Paz] is the unsaid certainty that these bodies now entangled in joy will one day be no more: every sexual act is a reminder of death and every death is a reminder that the body is born alone and will die alone, without its earthly companion, the Other.

Touch it. Not do not touch. It is beautiful. But it is dead.

There is no more painful fact than this: the bodies we love shall leave us before we want to leave them. We will leave the bodies that love us before they want to leave us. The extraordinary eroticism of certain couplings by Titian or Van Dyck or Manet is that Venus or Cupid, the Arnolfinis or a naked woman out on a picnic with a company of fully clothed men are all groupings of passage. The group will never be recomposed. All-of the subjects are separated, dead, unknown - radically unknown - to each other by the time that the painting is seen by us. I touch the hand of the woman - Sylvia - I love standing next to me, watching the work of art. Like Venus, Olympia or Arnolfini's wife, she too will sometime be gone without me or I without her. It is inevitable: bodies are not a synchronized reality. We see the painting. We touch. We must affirm, somehow, that our touch, our sexual act, defeats death: The picture before us says so. It also says that all sexual activity is a rehearsal of death.

Bury it. Save it from the animal's hunger.

Brian Nissen's vision of the erotic passion goes beyond our desire to defeat death: the sense of the erotic is to affirm life in death. This is not difficult for him, who coexists with Mexico and Spain, to understand and fulfill.

;

Exhume it Are you sure it has really died?

The candy skulls of the Day of the Dead in Mexico [Posada, Eisenstein], the funereal poetry of the Spanish baroque [Quevedo, Gongora] are celebrations of the wholeness of life: There is only life, and death is part of it. More than the zone [the soul] of the mystical, this is the province [the body] of the erotic. Only Eros goes beyond the sexual function in life, common to all reproductive organisms, and stakes a claim for sex in death. An ant or a panther [as far as we know] does not conceive sex beyond pleasure and reproduction. To this the child, the lover and the artist add: yes Death. An affirmation: To imagine the loved body beyond its corruption and disappearance? Much more: To save the body from fear of itself. This is what Brian Nissen the artist achieves. He is the Other: theArtist. Only the Other can do this for us. In life or in death.

Is there any other answer? Does the body have any other soul? Does the soul have any other body.