Unknown - Posed For Pleasure

Yes, these two drives, which are particular applications of imagination are one and the same, indivisible and with liberty and justice for all! “What then is the nature of what we may term- because that’s exactly what it is-creative imagination? “Creative imagination, ladies and gentlemen, is-” pausing to write on the board the word INQUIRY.

“Inquiry!” Armand shouts. “If. If art is a presentation of information, then, then! we have our answer to the question, ‘Why art?’ “Why art? Because, in the words of our nation’s favorite sleaze tabloid, inquiring minds want to know.

“That’s right, ladies and gentlemen-” leaning forward, transfixing those in the front rows with his sweeping gaze as he taps his forehead repeatedly with his finger, “I want to know! “I want to know if reality will confirm itself to me, in some fashion, by presenting my data back to me in the form I have envisioned and with the function I have envisioned for it, given my selection and manipulation of it, given the means and the media I have chosen for its presentation to the world and thereby to myself.

“Let us, therefore, enunciate a principle.

“If art is information, then its creation is inquiry! “And yes, I would mind writing that down.

“If you think it’s true, it’s worth remembering.

“If you disagree, then what’s the point of recollecting it? “Fear not, however; the book is in the works.

“To get on with life here, what do we have? “We have, I think, established insight, or at least an insight, into the conscious motivation of the artist, the inventor, the researcher-the housewife improving her cookie recipe.

“And the feedback, the by-product of the product? Aesthetic. An aesthetic.

“A mood, a thrill, an appreciation of the effect, the result of the information.

“Let me write down this chain reaction, the chain reaction of the reality interface of the successful work of art.”

And he writes,

IMAGINATION – INQUIRY – PRODUCTION – RESULT

“I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that the end product of the creative process is not the tangible product-the semi-final item in the process in the gospel according to Armand Fortuna-but the demonstrable effect, the affect, if you will- engendered by the function of that which has been produced.

“Not the airplane but flight itself was the true culmination of the Wright brothers’ efforts.

“Not the can opener or the opened can but the action of opening itself is the aesthetic of having invented the can opener.

“There you go, ladies and gentlemen, if you come away with nothing else from tonight’s lecture, you will remember having heard for the very first time the words aesthetic and can opener used in the same sentence.”

Armand pauses for the polite laughter and smattering of applause, and Jessica asks herself, how can it be?

How can it be that the rutting boar hog of two weeks ago and this cultured genius are one and the same? Almost, after last week’s lecture, she was tempted to ask him this very question.

In bed with him in his loft apartment, unable to work up her own libido because of the recollection of last weeks gross bestiality-a bestiality accompanied by a cold determination on Armand’s part to succeed, to prevail in his contest with Mister Galaxy.

Fire and ice, is Armand, surprising her. She would have thought him all fire.

She would have found in him the simple genius, the absent-minded professor, living in a world of his own, floating through this reality in a bubble, a macrocosm of his own thoughts.

But no, she discovered someone quite different from this preconception, found a man very much of this world, this reality, this time and place- much more a man of the world than she is a woman of the same, for all her supposedly clear and cynical powers of observation.

Fire and ice, he is, as she discovered in bed last week, as he fucked her while she lay there not responding to him, doing that at which women are so good, “having a mood”.

And that didn’t work, either.

She was having a mood, he a piece of ass.

She didn’t want to be an active sex partner? Hey, no problem, babe!

Because he will simply use her as an object, as a piece of appropriately shaped meat for purposes of masturbation, his eyes closed, his viewscreen vivid with who knows what images-images, she recalls recalling at the time, made all the more vivid by his belief-and hers-that imagination is comprised entirely of elements of reality.

And Armand, if he is nothing else, is surely the master of selecting those elements to create a masterpiece, whether a painting to hang on a wall, or a drama to be played out in the mind, featuring, naturally, Armand Fortuna.

Yes, he is fire and ice, as she thought that she was, until he reduced her to a warm puddle.

Still, she thought she saw an opening last week.

As the lecture series progresses, surely the book is not keeping pace, she told herself.

Where are his notes?

She suspects that they are those stacks of paper she sees in his open roll-top desk, jammed into a corner of the tiny alcove which precedes his bedroom.

Where is his word processor, his typewriter?

They are nowhere to be found here.

So that there, there! is her opening, her possibility of contribution to him, to his greatness and thereby her own.

He doesn’t wish to paint? So be it!

She will become his amanuensis, his editor and confidante in that creative process, one which must surely be more onerous and less familiar to him than brush and canvas.

Because if the written word is to be the means, ink and paper the medium, he must depend upon others.

For his proper mtier, she reasons, he needs nobody other than himself; but a book is a horse of a different color.

Yes, a book is an artifact with whose mechanics he is unfamiliar.

His art books are not really his; his only contribution to them was to give permission for the reproduction of his works-during that brief period between creation and sale that they were, physically and legally, his-and to sign copies on request.

So that he knows nothing of the authoring trade.

Not that he has some publisher looking over his shoulder with suggestions and deadlines.

Still, she knows Armand’s ego well enough that he will want to see his words of wisdom in print and looking like something worthy of himself.

Maybe, maybe she could get to where she wants to go that way, she tells herself.

Wouldn’t that be something, now! ‘Beyond Art and Passion,’ an inquiry into the nature of aesthetics, by Armand Fortuna, as told to none other than Jessica Famham.

Granted, the world of books is much less flashy than the world of art; still, she knows she could thus gain an “in” with the right people, the right crowd of the semi-cultured and the pseudo- intellectual.

And who knows?

She might become an author as well as an artist in her own right.

‘My Life with Armand Forturta,’ she thinks; that has quite a nice ring to it, does it not?

So that she did begin to warm up, to respond, not so much to Armand Fortuna’s obviously masturbatory attentions toward her, but to the idea of this alternative channel, this other, perhaps even better way to get where she is going.

Because face it; the extended, massive, multi-canvas depiction of woman in her many moods was done to death by Armand in the two Irene series.

Even the allegorical representation of woman, of the sensual, dark, evil side of her was fairly well exhausted in the Darlene series.

So what more does Armand have to say on canvas, really, concerning her, either as herself or as the representative of her sex in general?

So that the critics could very well decide that Armand Fortuna has reached a stage of redundancy in his life.