Category Archives: avant-garde

Gratuitous nudity #3

On The Necessity of Violation

“On The Necessity of Violation” by Jean-Jacques Lebel in TDR T41 (1968)

Description: Incl. photos of happenings – ‘Sunlove’ happening with the Soft Machine, 1967 (Mike Ratledge with naked girl), ‘Miss Festival Contest’ happening with a naked Yoko Ono in background, Lebel’s ‘Happening on the theme of Playtex bras’, etc. Also: Arrabal; Stefan Brecht; Ann Halprin; interviews with Jerzy Grotowski (17pp.) and Charles Ludlam

The tragedienne of strippers

Rita Renoir 2

Rita Renoir, stripteaseuse and intellectual

Rita Renoir was/is a French nude model, actress and ‘art’ stripteaseuse, known in Paris as the “tragedian of strippers.” She was mainly active in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s along with an ‘elite’ of European stripteaseuses with exotic names as Lady Chinchilla, Rita Hymalaya, Rafa Temporel, Dodo d’Hamburg, Poupée la Rose, Bonita Super, Véronique, Truda, Lova Moor, Bettina Uranium, Sofia Palladium, and Rosa Fumetto.

Her first ‘serious’ work was with the happenings and mise-en-scènes of Jean-Jacques Lebel (Picasso‘s Le désir attrapé par la queue), and her first critical success was in the film Les Immortelles by Bourgeade. She also starred in Pierre Koralnik‘s film Cannabis.

She also worked with Michel Simon and starred in The Red Desert as Emilia.

She played herself in Sois belle et tais-toi.

Freddy de Vree wrote an article about her, so did Julio Cortazar (Homenaje a una joven bruja).

Any extra info is more than welcome.

Informe, abjection and Robert Gober

Happy birthday Robert Gober. Google gallery.

I have found 35 useful sources for the informe, the abject, and religious purity, which tend to be related in current discourse. These terms are often seen as variations on a theme but should be considered as quite separate according to Rosalind Krauss (see October Winter 1993 and Krauss, 1997).

Three theorists appear in this discourse: Georges Bataile, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler.

The artists that have been associated with the informe, the abject, and the grotesque include Fontana, Joel-Peter Witkin, Robert Gober, John Miller, David Hammons, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley and David Lynch. [1]