Category Archives: art

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 – 2007)

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Sbs6wb2Fnc&]

Clickable version

Superb juxtapoem of image-to-music by Youtuber Zapple 101

Does anyone know which Karlheinz Stockhausen piece is on the audio track?

Update: regarding my previous question, the piece is “Mikrophonie 0.1”, here is more from Mikrophonie. (Studie II, 1954)

Eye candy #3

Moord in het Nudistenkamp

Moord in het Nudistenkamp (Eng: Murder at the Nudist Camp)

Honey West is a fictional character created by Gloria and Forest Fickling under the pseudonym “G.G. Fickling” and appearing in numerous mystery novels by the duo.

The character is notable as being one of the first female private detectives in popular fiction. She first appeared in the 1957 book This Girl for Hire and would appear in 10 novels before being retired in 1971. The character was also the basis for the short-lived TV series Honey West in the 1960s.

More Honey West here, from a fine collection of Dutch translations of detective novels. Probably the paratext (in this case the cover illustration) is better than the text itself.

Previously on Eye Candy.

Icons of erotic art #8

Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal Model (Enlarged x 1000) (1995) [1] is a sculpture by Jake and Dinos Chapman. It depicts lifesize fibreglass mannequins of children with genital organs of both sexes attached to their faces. It was shown at the Sensation exhibition in 1997, along with Great Deeds Against the Dead.

Sexual organs attached to faces is something I have been pondering on for as long as I can remember. What would have been the solution of the human race if this had been the case? How would we have covered the “pubic” area? How would lovemaking have looked like? This work by the Chapmans is remarkable, as is much of their other work. No doubt they are one of the most interesting contemporary artists.

In case you have been wondering why I only link to the pictures in this series, instead of showing the artworks in-line, the answer is that I keep a strict copyright policy after having had a run-in with my local copyright enforcement agency, SABAM, about two years ago. Since then, I only publish artworks by artists who have been dead for more than seventy years. Such is the law in Belgium. Belgian copyright law is even so strict that it prohibits to show photographs of buildings.

I find the use of mannequins in contemporary art very appealing, other works which have used this form are Chair, Table and Hat Stand by Allen Jones and Great Deeds Against the Dead, also by the Chapmans.

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

 

United Colors of Benetton

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1fNsjx1R6I&]

One of the few interesting magazines to come out of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was Colors by Benetton. Their first ever issue in 1991 featured an unwashed newborn baby [1] . Here [2] is an overview of the first 60 issues.

Benetton is nowhere as big a brand today as it was in the 1980s and while I was not exactly taken with their clothes, I did like the ads. I don’t see a comparable contemporary brand such as Tommy Hilfiger kicking this century a conscience.

Benetton Priest kissing a Nun

The mood wasn’t always as serious though, witness this playful update of the nunsploitation theme to the 20th century: a priest kissing a nun.

Icons of erotic art #7

Although French artist Francis Picabia’s work from the 1940s such as [1], [2], [3] and Woman with Bulldog [4]; which borrowed generously from soft-core pornography, is a much more likely candidate for the Icons of erotic art series, today I wish to celebrate Picabia’s entirely unerotic 1915 work: Portrait of an American Girl in the Nude[5], a drawing which depicts a spark plug supposedly representing Agnes Meyer. It is a satirical homage to the machine age and the American pin up girl.

Images sourced at Lemateurdart and K-Punk.

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

This entry also counts as the 15th significant artwork of the 20th century.

William Blake @250

The great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun (c. 1800) – William Blake

William Blake (November 28 1757 – August 12 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. Blake was an important proponent of imagination as the modern western world currently defines the word. His belief that humanity could overcome the limitations of its five senses is perhaps one of Blake’s greatest legacies. His words, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite,” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) were seen as bizarre at the time, but are now accepted as part of our modern definition of imagination. This quote was the source of the names for both The Doors musical group and Aldous Huxley‘s book The Doors of Perception.

Introducing Les Krims

Les Krims (born August 16, 1942) is a United States conceptual photographer. He is noted for his carefully arranged fabricated photographs (called “fictions”), various candid series, a surreal satirical edge, dark humor, and long-standing criticism of what he describes as leftist twaddle. Works such as Heavy Feminist with Wedding Cake [1] (1970) has been criticized by anti-pornography feminists and feminist photographers as being fetishistic, objectifying, body despising and a misogynist who uses his photography to humiliate predominantly women. Even though Krims does include men (often himself, nude) in his photos, these critics contend that his primary viciousness is reserved for women.

Tip of the hat to [1].

Headlessness, armlessness and dismemberment

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmb34upfAro]

A Night to Dismember is a film by Doris Wishman. The story is about a woman from a “cursed” family who is released from a mental facility, and soon dismembered corpses start turning up.

Excuse the lack of coherence in this post. I wanted to show you the trailer above (which is undoubtedly for a bad film) and shine the light on a Chinese contemporary artist I discovered by way of Lemateurdart. The artist is Liu Jianhua and he makes armless and headless porcelain female bodies in suggestive poses such as this one, this one, and this one. His work reminds of china by Luigi Colani such as this, and the bas relief hors-d’oeuvre plates produced in the seventies (no photo as of yet, check Designing Tomorrow in Car Styling 23, chief editor Akira Fujimoto, published September 1978).

Icons of erotic art #6

The work I present today is erotic and sad at the same time. Its eroticism is implied by its transgression, most transgressions are erotic by nature. For its sadness, you only need to look at the facial expressions of Valie, the “toucher” and the bystander.

Valie Export‘s Tapp- und Tast-Kino (“Touch Cinema”) a piece of performance “body art”, was performed in ten European cities in 1968-1971.

Valie Export built a tiny “movie theater” around her naked upper body, so that her body could not be seen but could be touched by anyone reaching through the curtained front of the “theater”. She then went into the street and invited men, women, and children to come and touch her.

The context of “Touch Cinema” was the bra burning feminism professed by New York Radical Women and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.