Femicide Through the Art Lens

The curious case of Bertrand Cantat

We often see art as a higher realm of existence. Throw the art coin in the air, and you might just get the other side of it, which is distillation of hubris. This text formed in my mind as I watched the Netflix documentary From Rockstar to Killer about Bertrand Cantat, a French rockstar so beloved by the press and the public that even after he killed his girlfriend with 19 violent blows to her face and body, one of which broke her nose, he shifted everyone’s attention to the victim and to their « passionate » relationship. This unattainability rested on old ideals which lock us inside predatory fantasies perfected in art’s laboratory.

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The idea that artists have access to a mysterious corner of the mind is not new. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Federico Zuccaro would define this faculty as disegno (drawing, not only as a technical skill but also the faculty of defining, outlining, projecting and inventing), a term he considered equivalent to idea if you’re a theologist and intention or concept if you’re a philosopher. These words all refer to what he considers to be the trace of god in humans.

The difference between regarding the mind as a sublimation or as a bubbling cauldron of compulsions depends upon ones’ philosophical affiliations. When I was a student at the Parisian Lycée Pasteur Hypokhâgne, I had a self-proclaimed Derridian English teacher who skimmed Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar looking for holes and phallic similes. We were so petrified of failing that we watched in bewilderment a sea of bobbing penises and vaginas undulating over one of Shakespeare’s least titillating books. Nevertheless, even sad mis-readings of deconstructionism can be perceived as an elevated expression of the human condition.

Suprematism, Abstract-Expressionism, Conceptualism, Minimalism attempted to create a fourth dimension. Remember Ad Reinhardt’s comic strip with a person standing in front of an abstract painting asking “what does this represent?”, to which the painting, taking human form and leaping towards the person asks: “what do YOU represent?”? It brilliantly exposes this newfound space of expunged existence. However, when abstraction was finally crushed by the weight of its own theory, some of us were relieved to find a tangible purpose in it. The neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 70s emboldened us to transgress definitions and their fields, which has contributed, among other things, to encompassing spiritualist practices, and reopen a closed chamber of art and its excluded voices. In 2005, the Drawing Center in New York presented the exhibition 3 x Abstraction New Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, and Agnes Martin, stating that:

“these three artists, each from a different generation spanning the last one hundred years, approach geometric abstraction not as formalism, but as a means of visualizing philosophical, scientific, and transcendental ideas.”

How fascinating that the “new” methods of drawing came from two women born in the nineteenth century, both transcendentalist, one of them, Kunz, who described herself as a “researcher” having dedicated her life to telepathy, prophecy and healing and the other, af Klint, was a Rosicrucionist, Theosophist and an Anthroposophist who notoriously said that her paintings could only be revealed decades after her death.

The third one, Agnes Martin, self-ostracised in the desert and dedicated her whole ascetic life to what many have described as a form of enlightenment – a myth built on the silence around Martin’s crisis in mid-life perhaps related to her queerness, and certainly to her mental health issues, which are believed to have been bipolarity or schizophrenia.

The tragic context of an openly patriarchal system such as the one Kunz and af Klint were born in, is that we’ll never know whether they’d have found their identity within the art world such as their mystic male counterparts did, like August Strindberg, William Blake and others. But more importantly, their non-inscription in society precluded them from actively affecting the way we live, think, love and construct ourselves. The patriarchal version of reality kept on shaping our dreams. (Recently, in conversation, a female colleague told me that “there are no women in old museums because women did not make art before the twentieth century”.)

What does that entail? It’s a two-way street: art affects reality, but societal behaviours and beliefs are also weaved into art and its theories by those who do not weave by definition, the patriarchs. Art, not being a sieve or a mere translation, enchants and sublimates. Deeply rooted morals are refined, mythologised, perfected by artistic practices and passed on as ideals to us. And the complexity of this issue is that art is not a message, it is not propaganda: an artwork is layered in meaning and a variety of subjects. Sometimes, its theory is more direct.

Af Klint’s generation in Europe saw the rise of Women’s Rights movements. This forced men to define what gender is, in its binary accepted form of male and female, and where it belongs to. The status quo was threatened and society was evolving inexorably. So they thought, wrote, and attributed specific roles and functions, some of them dubiously sacralising, to the other half of humanity. The struggle to envisage women as creative people across the twentieth century is speculatively disconcerting. Its concrete social impact is a spectrum of romanticised functionalities for women, which lock them in a spectrum of oppression from being reluctantly accepted as professionals to victims of crime.

Speaking of which, Adolf Loos, the author of Ornament and Crime, and Egon Schiele, both sequestered and pressured girls from the street to spend time in their studios, molesting them and drawing them – the latter, Schiele – while advocating for Women’s Liberation – that would be Loos. The Viennese intellectuals and artists were steeped in the Kindweib or Kindfrau (Child Woman) construct of femininity to which they now allowed an activity as painters, activists, poets. But with nuance:

(…) the woman painter is fundamentally dictated to imitation and emulation of men’s works, to naturalism, dilettantism, and formalism. Originality is always lacking. One very well finds a strong sense of color harmony, yet never that deep sense of color achieving poetic psychology with tone nuances. Woman’s talent is only sufficient for the echoable, decorative, and ornamental… Karl Scheffer, Die Frau und die Kunst, p. 42.

The last word appears in Loos’ book title (which was an object of fascination for many young artists when I relocated to Paris twenty years ago). He attacked Art Nouveau for its feminised, overly decorated craft, and promoted unadorned design and architecture as a masculine aesthetic based on a rational vision of the world where function must be the guiding force of form, and thus creation.

When I speak of distillation, I mean exactly this: compare Scheffer’s statement above, which is a mere compilation of sentences, to Loos’ striking and original writing style in the first page of Ornament and Crime:

“The first ornament that came into being, the cross, had an erotic origin. The first work of art, the first artistic action of the first artist daubing on the wall, was in order to rid himself of his natural excesses. A diagonal line: the reclining woman. A horizontal line: the man who penetrates her. The man who created it felt the same urge as Beethoven, he experienced the same joy that Beethoven felt when he created the Ninth Symphony.

But the man of our time who daubs the walls with erotic symbols to satisfy an inner urge is a criminal or a degenerate.”

What an outlandish piece of writing and thinking. Not only is the artist « the man » at a time when women were finally attaining exposure and even some recognition on a wider scale, but the artist was also a creative channelling « urges ». One could base a whole thesis on these paragraphs only. What is striking is that one could – and many have – perceive a moral advancement here: now, we do not succumb to urges, we are civilised. However, Loos is not talking about sexual mores, he is talking about his purist aesthetic, his sublime distillation of “urges” in art, design and architecture. A mildly more awake read reveals that the “urge” is masculine, “the man who penetrates her”. No idea if the woman is sleeping, lustful or simply… there. It’s the Kim Kardashian beige, minimal house where her performative and enhanced version of femininity plays the role of the C.E.O. of her sexuality. And here lies the insidiousness of the modern, capitalist patriarchy: it is taking away agency by pretending to give it in a “civilised” form.

When researching Surrealist women artists in the 70s, Gloria Feman Orenstein realised that the very movement to which they belonged defined them as “Femme-Enfant” – “Woman-Child”. What of the women when they reached their mature years?, she wondered, if according to André Breton “art should be systematically preparing for the accession of the Woman-Child to the whole empire of perceptible things”. The artists she contacted, among which Leonora Carrington, although she doesn’t explicitly say if it was her, confessed that they were conflicted by the notion.

If you think that this is a form of adoration, or at least praise, Fenan Orenstein has other quotes for you which uncover the influence – and probably the pre-existence of the Woman-Child delirium, passed on to women, who candidly receive it: Google “am I a Woman-Child?”, and you’ll find a number of quizzes to test if you’ve attained this sacral ideal. (Disclaimer: I’ve mostly found them in French. This has become quite specific to French culture, which was the territory and language in which the term was defined for Surrealism. The equivalent in English might be be « Pixie Girl»?).

“If feminine art suggests plastically but with grace what men express with authority, if feminine painting reserves for itself the domain of exquisite and charming things that only children and fairies have access to, then Marie Laurencin is a painter”.

This is François Mathey and his book Six Femmes Peintres (Six Women Painters) of 1951, which states very clearly that men are the authority, the author, the creative. Women are begrudgingly conceded the craft of painting but not the authorship. But more importantly, they have access to the spiritual, the supernatural, and the infantile. Woman-Children. How interesting to look at Laurencin’s paintings and realise that, unlike the women in Surrealist art, whose bodies were thingisisied, hybridised, her women and children do not have curves, are not cut into pieces, they are whole, singular, unsupervised bodies.

As for Francois Mathey, he was the curator and chief-curator of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris from 1953 to 1985, where he implanted the first educational service in museums in France in 1953, the « Atelier de moins de 13 ans » with Pierre Belvès. He promoted a transversal notion of art and blurred its borders, thus curating the first exhibition of comics in 1967 and promoting its artists such as Tomi Ungerer. He also curated an exhibition titled « Équivoque » in 1973, which associated Impressionist artists with Art Pompier (a discarded form of art of the same period considered inferior). Undoubtedly a great professional.

As a child of the Carnation Revolution, I bathed in French culture, which was reinforced by my attending the Lycée «Français Charles LePierre in Lisbon. I was obsessed with Joe Dassin as a child, then Vanessa Paradis, and later on, inevitably, La Mano Negra and Noir Désir. But mostly, it was French cinema that I watched with curiosity and which came to influence a part of my tastes for the decades to come: Goddard, Truffaut which led me to Bergman, Bertolucci, and my all time favourite, Eric Rohmer. Nevertheless, there was something which prevented me from adhering to all of them, bar the latter: th

By now everyone has written ad nauseam about Adolescence.I won’t bury the lead: I wasn’t convinced. I do appreciate the much needed effort bla bla. Why does it exhaust me so much even talking about it? Probably because the focus on the father and the actor who is also the co-writer - the priceless acting opportunity of the dad realizing what his son did - feels like a triple whammy. This wouldn’t be an issue if the mothers and daughters weren’t so absent or badly written. In the last jarring episode, the father - actor - co-writer is still the centre of the narrative. It’s his birthday, and the family, his daughter and wife, gravitate around him like two high strung planets orbiting around a flaming sun afflicted with recurring explosions. Everything is so superficially treated that the murdered girl is apparently a bully who accused the murderer of being an Incel. It’s not that he was one, it’s through her that he found out about Incel culture. I’m puzzled by this choice.

Let me tell you that my experience with incel culture was not like that. One of my kids, B., a few years ago, started reporting narratives about a rapper’s suicide having been caused by his girlfriend. She had misbehaved, she didn’t do her job etc. Meaning, she wasn’t a docile dedicated girlfriend serving her boyfriend at all times and forgetting her needs - what needs?! in order to give her life in exchange of his. We had a long conversation, we talked about incel culture, how to spot the lingo and what a grown-up heterosexual relation looks like (so far he’s straight as plumb line). He’s the best, it was a beautiful chat, which we’ve kept on having. A few days later, we went camping with friends and on that weekend the Southport murders took place. The murderer had been plunging into incel culture.

We know where my kid got those stories from. All our kids got a phone at thirteen. We never put any parental controls, nor did we manage their time on them. We nagged them, we had conversations with them, we asked them what they were seeing. One time, one of them was helping a trans kid who had been renegaded by their family in Scotland in the infamous ?,, website. I told him it might be a pedophile baiting him. To this day, I’m not sure it was legit or not. When I told him that for me selfies are a cry for help or professional promotion on social media he told me social media helped him feel good about himself in days where he didn’t hate himself and it was a way of recording it. [yes, his mental health was not good at the time]. They explored, they learned a lot from it, and they wasted hours and hours on it. Just like us. Or not as bad as us.

I manage 3 Instagram accounts, one Bluesky account, a podcast newsletter on MailChimp, my writing on Substack, Spotify for Creators for the website, Riverside for editing episodes and clips, YouTube where I try to play with clips and posting the episodes of the podcast, WhatsApp messages, Signal messages, and Instagram messages, likes, and Instagram live, three email accounts, my podcast website. I’m on my own, I don’t have a team like most celebrity podcasters. I’m far more on the so socials than my kids.

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