Category Archives: grotesque

World cinema classics #28

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCpyqiee-Z8]

El Topo (1970) – Alejandro Jodorowsky

“El Topo is not a Western, it goes further than any Western … El Topo is not a religious film, it contains all religions … This film is bloody… El Topo is miraculous and terrible … El Topo is monstrous and cruel”

This slightly overrated curio premiered exactly 37 years today at the Elgin, New York.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.

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.

 

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].

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.

Introducing Opicino de Canistris

Canistris

 Via a re-reading of Gordon Rattray Taylor‘s Freudian interpretation of history Sex in History (1954) chapter on Renaissance sexual morality, titled “Fay ce que vouldras” (“Do what thou wilt”, the motto from Rabelais) comes the work of Opicino de Canistris. With only 659 Google hits, this 13th century Italian writer appears to be a relative rarity. Canistris would have been a perfect entry for the late blog Il Giornale Nuovo.

See also Canistris’s Google gallery