Sketch: Jeppe Hansen

This is barely even a sketch, more like a sketch of a sketch, but I hurried it along because there’s a lot I want to write about this subject.

The summer that my grandfather gave me his old thirty-five millimeter rangefinder camera, my family piled in the car and drove up to Bennington, Vermont where my sister would spend the summer studying dance. It was unseasonably cool and the sky was overcast. Somewhere in my boxes of old photos I have pictures of the dormitories, austere white houses ranged around a green with the hills and mountains in the background. I followed my sister as she went to check out the dance studios. The studios there were truly gorgeous, large modern rooms lit by skylights. At my request, my sister moved about the space as I took photographs.

Last Saturday, I spent an hour or two poking around looking for good footage of Bob Fosse’s choreography on the internet. Under the temporary delusion that I don’t have nearly enough irons in the fire already, I was thinking of starting a series exploring some of my artistic influences. I’ve only posted a small amount of my older work, but the human body has figured prominently in my work since adulthood. It’s hard to imagine that having a dancer for an older sister was without any effect.

Adolf Loos, in his essay “Ornament and Crime,” famously stated, “All art is erotic.”

The first ornament that was born, the cross, was erotic in origin. The first work of art, the first artistic act which the first artist, in order to rid himself of his surplus energy, smeared on the wall. A horizontal dash: the prone woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her.

To contemporary ears, the sexism, the heterosexism and, elsewhere in the essay, the ethnocentrism stands out. However, the vague sense that there is something not quite proper about art is an idea that comes up in cultural environments very different from Loos’. Loos, needless to say, wanted to rid architecture of ornament, not temporarily as Louis Sullivan wanted, put permanently. “Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.”

If abstract marks on a wall can communicate eroticism, artwork based on the body has bears an even greater association the erotic impulse. In dance, the body itself is the medium.

In her book, Sisters of Salome, Toni Bentley, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet, explores the relationship between dance, eroticism and nudity.

The connection between Bernardin, the king of naked dancing, and Balanchine, the great ballet choreographer, became clear as I experienced an astonishing moment of self-recognition: this glamorous, slim, athletic woman was a Balanchine dancer without her leotard – and I was she. The striptease at the Crazy Horse gave new meaning to my years spent in tights, tutus, and tiaras. Partial, simulated, decorated and disguised nudity is part of the appeal of a ballerina. …

In dancing Balanchine we were dancing naked (if we were dancing well) – not only in showing every delineation of a highly trained body, but in “turning out,” classical ballet’s guiding force, where hips, legs and feet are literally opened outward, away from each other. What is revealed is the sexual core. In attempting this unnatural vertical physical split, encounters with one’s moral and spiritual bodies are inevitable; it is deep and dangerous exposure.

Art is artifice and there good reasons people want to draw the line between work utilizing the human form which is not erotic, artwork that is intended to be erotic and reality. Once, while regarding one of my paintings exploring sexuality side by side with a man who ostensibly wanted to discuss the work, I felt his hand go up my skirt. This is as inappropriate while regarding a painting as it is in many other non-sexual contexts. That I paint sexual images does not mean that I simply want random hands fondling my genitalia.

I have posed nude, for both painters and photographers, and I have drawn and painted a great number of nude models myself. I groan and roll my eyes when people talk about artists and their models as if they are always, inevitably, lovers.  I’m sure it has happened, but, if you haven’t posed yourself, let me warn you there’s nothing sexy about being slightly chilly, incredibly bored and having a crick in your neck or an itch you can’t scratch. No one has ever made a pass at me during a modeling session, and if someone did I think I would put on my clothes, walk out of there and never go back.

Artists of all sorts, not least of all dancers, have long existed under a cloud of disrepute, although that has lifted significantly over the course of the last century. Has that come with excessive denials of any sexual content in art whatsoever? Sexual experience is part of the human experience and, as such, is as legitimate a subject for art as any other part of the human experience. The sexy moves in the clip from Bob Fosse’s oeuvre must have taken many unsexy hours in the dance studio to perfect. As the dancers embrace one another, we are seeing art, not reality. Anything that threatens to blur that line, as in that film clip, causes intense discomfort. Therefore, it is disappointing, if not surprising, that the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School has dismissed one of its students, Jeppe Hansen, presumably for appearing in a pornographic film. (h/t JerBear)

Once, as a teenager, when a group of friends and I went backstage to meet Merce Cunningham after a performance, he mistook us for young aspiring dancers rather than simply fans and tried to impart a few pieces of advice. One thing he said is, “I don’t want to hear any of you say that you can’t be a dancer. There is a form of dance out there for you.” Who am I to question the wisdom of Merce. So, Jeppe Hansen, there is a form of dance out there for you.