Category Archives: art

Icons of erotic art #22

Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing Mask (c. 1865–66) by Thomas Eakins

This drawing by American artist Eakins is a testament to the aphrodisian qualities of sensory deprivation. Central to this drawing are the breasts, ripe and heavy, surreal and unreal, proof that the most beautiful of women are not to be found in real life (except in brief photographic glimpses); but rather on paper.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!

Dead Mother (1898) by Max Klinger

“May she wake in torment!’ he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. ‘Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not THERE – not in heaven – not perished – where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered DO haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts HAVE wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only DO not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I CANNOT live without my life! I CANNOT live without my soul!“

That’s the end of Wuthering Heights‘ Heathcliff‘s tirade against his faithless lover Catherine who has just died in childbirth, a speech which begins in anger and blasphemy and ends in beseechment and pleading, which epitomizes the love hate relationship between the two characters.

Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë‘s only novel. The narrative tells the tale of the all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and how this love hate relationship eventually destroys both themselves and many around them.

An obsession with the female form

Baby Got Back (a.k.a. “I Like Big Butts“)

Via gmtPlus9 (-15) comes outsider artist par excellence Miroslav Tichý, a Czech photographer and painter. During many years Tichý wandered the small Moravian town of Kyjov in rags, pursuing his obsession with the female form by secretly photographing women in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, children’s spectacle lenses and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected. His work remained largely unknown until 2005, when he was 79 years old.

The energy of art

No-Stop City, Interior Landscape, 1969 by Archizoom Associati

It was American experimental musician Rhys Chatham who first pointed out that the energy of art is always equal (except in periods of extreme hardship such as famine and war, where production tapers off), but has at the same time the tendency to displace itself. In music for example, the energy in the 1950s was in rock and roll, in the 1980s it was to be found in house music and techno.

The energy in international design in the late 1960s and early 1970s was clearly to be found in Italy. Displayed above is No-Stop City, a “radical design” architectural project by Archizoom Associati first introduced to the public in 1969. It is a critique of the ideology of architectural modernism, of which Archizoom felt that it had reached its limits. The artistic discourse of that era was buzzing with the term neo avant-garde, in a period that corresponds with Late Modernism or early postmodern art. The term neo avant-garde was rejected by many, but the term can be interpreted to refer to a second wave of avant-garde art such as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus.

If you want to read up on this period, please consult the following excellent volume:

The Hot House (1984) – Andrea Branzi [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Prices in Amazon Europe are around 40€, in America starting from 12USD, a bargain.

About the male and female gaze

See male gaze, female gaze

Following the comments of Lichanos on Icons of erotic art #21, here is some info about the concept of the gaze in visual culture.

The concept of gaze (often also called the gaze or, in French, le regard), in analysing visual culture, is one that deals with how an audience views the people presented. The concept of the gaze became popular with the rise of postmodern philosophy and social theory and was first discussed by 1960s French intellectuals, namely Michel Foucault‘s description of the medical gaze and Lacan‘s analysis of the gaze’s role in the mirror stage development of the human psyche. This concept is extended in the framework of feminist theory, where it can deal with how men look at women, how women look at themselves and other women, and the effects surrounding this. A key text regarding the male gaze is Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) by Laura Mulvey. Outside of visual culture, the concept of the gaze is connected to voyeurism.

Iconic images that represent the gaze is Kiki staring close-up in the camera in Ballet Mécanique (1924, above) [1]; Un Regard oblique (1948) by Robert Doisneau ([2]) and Sophia Loren eyeing Jayne Mansfield’s décolleté (ca.1957/58), a photograph by Joe Shere ([3]).

Introducing Laurie Simmons

Walking Gun, 1991

Laurie Simmons (born 1949) is an American artist, known for such works as Walking Gun, 1991. Her recent work is explicit in nature (see [1], [2] and [3]) and involves cut-out montages.

Tip of the hat to Lemateurdart

Google gallery

Icons of erotic art #21

Der Netzzeichner (English: Artist and Model in the Studio) is a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, first published in The Painter’s Manual in 1525. The woodcut is said to portray the dominance of the male gaze in Western visual culture, illustrating the consequences of mechanizing the relationship between the viewer and the viewed.

The illustration Artist and Model in the Studio by Albrecht Dürer, first published in The Painter’s Manual in 1525, is a woodcut that has been readily used to illustrate the dominance of the male gaze in Western visual culture, as well as the general consequences of mechanizing the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. In 1993 French photographic artist Dany Leriche appropriated Dürer’s original image as Hanneke et Elise [1], interpretable as a feminist-inspired rejection of the male gaze. The image is part of a diptych – the second part is a photograph of the model taken through the grid from the point of view of the observer.

Previous appropriations at Jahsonic included Balthus’s The Guitar Lesson [1] by Japanese photographer Naoto Kawahara in 2007 [2].

Tip of the hat to Lemateurdart.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

Art or exhibitionism?

Above is a feebly related image to introduce this post on Art or exhibitionism?

A recent post ^[1] by Belgian blogger Martin Pulaski, in which he shares with his readers his list of medication, prompts me to think about the relation between art and exhibitionism.

All of us bloggers are to a lesser or greater extent exhibitionists and artists. We want to share, get our message out there, we imagine a readership, we want it to grow, we want to connect. All are qualities of the artist and the exhibitionist. Whether we succeed or not can only be left to posteriority. This has not always been the case perhaps, I hear myself wonder. It hasn’t and it has.

One can easily point to the Romantics and JJR‘s Confessions as a starting point of this exhibitionism. One can even go further back to Catullus who authored these incredibly explicit lines of poetry in the first century BC.

Coming back to the present age and the contemporary relevance of “art or exhibitionism?,” there has been the internet which has made each and everyone of us self-publishers.

Back to the arts, the real arts, the institutionalized arts.

I’ve been very much intrigued by Tracey Emin‘s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, a concept that needs no explanation except maybe a Google gallery^[2].

I’ve made a variation on this candid list: Everyone I’ve personally known who committed suicide. I know it’s macabre, even more than Emin’s listing the foetus of her aborted child; but this is a dedication to those who’ve said goodbye, and a thank-you-note to whoever for my life until now.

Icons of erotic art #20

Consider me: my hands can not cover my breasts, I cling to them tightly to hide my shame. But also consider this: sunlit windows gaze down upon me like undeniable eyes, millions of bronze eyes; and shame turns into pride.

Jeune fille en buste 1794 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a typical illustration for the blog Femme, femme, femme.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

The Aporias of the Avant-Garde

While I was in Amsterdam in the winter of 2006-2007 I asked the people in a philosophy bookstore: “If Slavoj Žižek and Sloterdijk are my two favorite contemporary philosophers, who would the third be?” They came up with Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Alain Badiou.

I had remembered Badiou but had almost forgotten Enzensberger, but last weekend at the used book store De Slegte I bought a Dutch translation of Enzensberger’s Einzelheiten, and was very much taken by his analysis of the concept avant-garde in his essay The Aporias of the Avant-Garde.

Aporias, published in 1962 in Germany, is one of the first essays that preached the “death of the avant-garde” which has been celebrated since the advent of postmodernism. It features good analyses too of Lukacs petty defense of literary realism and stimulating reflections on the absurdity of some critics’ grouping of individual artists into art movements, especially in cases such as expressionist literature (no writer has ever called himself expressionist).

On a general level it provides excellent etymological and semantic analyses of the term avant-garde.

P.S. Published in the same year was another work on avant-garde practices, which I suspect is more an eulogy: The Theory of the Avant-garde by Renato Poggioli.