From conversations between Liz and Edmund
Edmund:
I think I'll incorporate this nude woman in the foreground of my next painting. I like the dynamic of having a nude woman at the centre of a homoerotic scene
Liz:
Yeah women's bodies can be so statuesque... and soft and yummy
Edmund:
Have you ever seen 'The Hunger' (Tony Scott, 1983)
It has a lesbian vampire love scene between Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve.
When it was being filmed and they were having to pash, Susan Sarandon kept breaking into laughter because she was amazed at how soft a woman's lips are.
No I prefer women to 'plonk' when they pose.
The hunger is a must see, David Bowie is a vampire as well in it.
Everything is very beautifully shot and almost everything between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon is implied rather than seen
Have you seen Visconti's Death in Venice, (1971)?
It's about a pathetic middle age man who trawls around after a very pretty teenage boy
I want to reimagine it as young openly gay white collar male who chooses in an empowered way an older man.
I like the way that once you put strong sexy nude women in a painting that the meaning of a very pretty young man changes
Apparently for older male escort worker’s, a lot of their clients are young men who choose an older male partner.
It’s a relationship where the younger male is definitely the empowered member of the relationship.
I want to reimagine Viscontis ‘Death in Venice’ film, but also the passive foppish pretty boy, so that there's a different narrative, a different set of power relationships.
Really everyone in the film is disempowered, both the pathetic middle aged man but also the pretty boy.
The sub narrative is that the middle aged man is pathetic because he's middle aged but really he's pathetic because he's in denial about being gay, and doesn't have a community to fall back on where he can be honest about who he is.
But also the pretty boy doesn't have a community either, so if you reimagine him hanging out with sexy strong nude women it gives him a context where he can find a comfortable space.
The woman in the middle ground is based on a photo of a young Mirka Mora, according to her autobiography she was married with children and liked to undress for the male gaze from time to time and really why not.
Mirka Mora was a very strong person and along with Sunday Reed they became these amazing Jewish matriarch’s of the post-war Melbourne artworld.
The post-war Melbourne artworld was very 'social realist' and social realism is very Jewish.
To have two such dominating matriarchs controlling an Australian arts community is unprecedented and has never been repeated, its usually males who do the controlling.
Only in the New York artworld do you also have the all powerful matriarch, probably Jewish.
Bjorn andresen, the ‘Death in Venice’ pretty boy was very exploited but survived and is still acting, he looks like Gandalf these days.
He still has a certain charm though.
I've replaced Mirka Mora with a cross dressing Marlene Dietrich, as usual my brain has ricocheted off on some obscure tangent, making the narrative of the painting incoherent.
I think the original story in the painting now has been lost in the over the top theatricality of Marlene Dietrich.
I’ve reimagined the three of them in some abandoned derelict house or vestry in Central or remote Victoria.
A cross dressing Marlene, Bjorn in bathers, gazing at a nude woman on a couch in a derelict abandoned weatherboard building in remote Victoria, yes the narrative has now become incoherent….
And fun.