Category Archives: voyeurism

Gratuitous nudity #11 and Icon of Erotic Art #32

Sophie Dahl, i-D, 1997

Sophie Dahl first came to my attention with her Opium (perfume) ad[1].

Today, following a link that started[2] at Trevor Brown‘s blog, which celebrated Takashi Itsuki‘s acrotomophiliac eroticism, which backlinked [3] to the new magazine Coilhouse (amazing new magazine, started as a blog in Aug 2007), I arrived at the photography of Nick Knight. On his SHOWstudio.com site, one finds this image[4] (first published in i-D, 1997), which frankly, leaves me sick with desire. Just what is it that brings on this sickness? It’s the softness of her skin, the presumed quality of her fatty tissue, the pot belly and the pear-shaped breasts. And the nails. Amen.

This is a first for my series, where an image is both an instance of gratuitous nudity and an Icon of Erotic Art.

Introducing Barry Burman (1943-2001)

Tartan_Ribbon, the first colour photograph

Which one is Burman? Click.

Salome by British artist Barry Burman (1943-2001)[1] via Trevor Brown [2] . Trevor notes Burman’s work as a personal inspiration after reading Peter Webb‘s The Erotic Arts and makes a comparison to the work of Graham Ovenden. Burman committed suicide in 2001.

Notes of the previous days:

2008 August 1

Valter of Surreal Documents has written the first post in a series devoted to Stefan Jaworzyn‘s exploitation film fanzine Shock Xpress. These posts will present to you YouTube videos of the films featured in the three books which collect the fanzine’s best articles. He starts with biographical information on Jaworzyn.[4]

The previous thematic outing of Valter was centered around Exotica by Toop [5].

2008 August 2

Web 2.0 is slowly becoming a reality. WordPress, Flickr, YouTube, Last.fm, Del.icio.us, LibraryThing and Facebook made me realize that. I need an API-driven platform that can integrate the aforementioned, with my wiki as backbone. Things such as Spinlets which let you create “mashups“. Something as easy to use as the defunct Hypercard, which was my first hypertext experience, in the pre-internet days. It would allow Amazon.com integration for my Wiki too.

2008 August 3

On the difference between nakedness and nudity .

I am sceptical that Leiber and Stoller wrote “Hound Dog“. They probably heard it in an African American Vernacular English version in a juke joint (I heard a version not so long ago which went “you ain’t looking for a woman, you just looking for a ho“), bowdlerized it and released it in a version palatable to the WASP crowd. Cfr. Elvis‘s “One Night (song)” and Cole Porter‘s “I Get a Kick Out of You“. The latter had its drug reference “I get no kick from cocaine,” changed to “I get perfume from Spain,” for radio airplay, the earlier was first titled “One Night of Sin.”

Most therapists have knowledge of psychology but too many of them are at a loss when it comes to philosophy. Most culturati look to philosophy and sociobiology rather than psychology for an answer to “meaning of life.” Contemporary therapists who wish to cater for a sophisticated crowd should watch I Heart Huckabees, read about existential humanism and existential therapy, and study Emmy van Deurzen and others on the Passion Paradox.

See also, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

Saw Demonlover, my second and hopefully last film of Assayas. The previous one was Irma Vep … just as terrible. The only redeeming element Demonlover was the introduction of the concept of Hellfire Club. Even the SY soundtrack is barely audible. Glad I got to see Chloë Sevigny, aka miss Brown Bunny.

2008 August 4

The Fold is a new web-based film series written by husband-and-wife writing team, Ray Sawhill and Polly Frost. It will be viewable at http://www.thefold.tv as from now. It is an erotically-based science fiction series.

Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies

Gratuitous nudity #8

Lest I be accused of too much theory, it is time for some gratuitous nudity, number 8 in our series[1].

Source: [Bxzzines]

This picture, taken from an unknown issue of Paris-Tabou, comes our way via Bxzzines [2], the blog on French obscure magazines.

This particular photo depicts a nude female embraced by a robot. The title is “L’amour en l’an 2000”, love in the year 2000. If we consider the robot as dressed, we can categorize this picture as belonging to the nude female/dressed male trope, should this notion to be far-fetched, it can still qualify to shed light on the sex and science fiction trope.

Paris Tabou was a French pin-up magazine published from September 1949 until 1953. Possibly taking its name from the Tabou Club, it published pin-up girls and stories by such authors as Boris Vian, who contributed L’Amour est aveugle, published in its first issue in 1949). Illustrators included the Italian Gino Boccasile.

Do not be surprised if it turns up at the excellent blog PonyXpress [3], the author of which has just favorited it at my Flickr stream[4].

Matter?

[Amazon.com]
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The Big Penis Book is a 2008 book by Taschen on big penises and the men they belong to. The book, like its predecessor The Big Book of Breasts, was edited by Dian Hanson.

From a nobrow perspective it’s interesting that one of the earliest researchers on the subject was Caribbean author and theorist Frantz Fanon who covers this subject in some detail in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) tended towards the view that the supposed positive correlation between penis size and African ancestry is erroneous.

See penis size.

World cinema classics #52, 53 and 54

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oawa85d_bJY]

Red Road trailer

I watched the 2006 British film Red Road yesterday evening. The film felt like reading a nouveau roman: no interior nor exterior monologue whatsoever (by that I mean an almost wholly depersonalized narration), the story is revealed through images and short pieces of dialog and benefits from having no prior information of the plot. The film is very reminiscent of that other little gem, Intimacy , but also of Haneke’s Caché because of its intense claustrophobia and manic voyeurism.

As far as my interest in prurience goes, Red Road had everything I had found lacking in Lust, Caution.

Michael Dwyer notes:

“There are shades of Michael Haneke‘s best work about this often unbearably gripping psychological thriller. It is as frank in its sexual candour as in its scenes of unflinching violence, and it offers no soft dramatic compromises.”

Red Road is World Cinema Classic #52, Caché #53 and Intimacy #54.

Introducing French Book Covers

French blog Au carrefour étrange has ceased its activities for the time being and started a new blog called French book covers [1] which is illustrated with a chic cover photo [2] by the Italian designer and photographer Carlo Mollino. Its author, who goes by the pseudo of Losfeld, has a very extensive collection of books, running the gamut from surrealist theory to sleazy paperbacks, what I like to call nobrow.

A recent post[3] at this new blog featured cover art by French publishing house La Brigandine, for which Jahsonic regular Jean-Pierre Bouyxou has written novels under the pseudonym Georges Le Gloupier before that name was appropriated by the entarteur Noël Godin, a highschool buddy of Bouyxou. One particular of those novels is called Les Accidents de l’amer (Eng: Accidents of the Sea, or accidents of Bitterness, depending on where you place the apostrophe or blank space) and has one of the sexiest covers[4] I’ve seen in some time, due to the particular areola shape of the woman depicted.

I cannot pinpoint (or haven’t tried) the date of these publications, but I would gather mid to late 1970s.

Introducing Colette Calascione

From various Flickr members.

Colette Calascione (born in 1971) is an American artist. She received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, California. Her work has been shown at St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California and the San Francisco Art Institute, as well as in many galleries, most notably in the San Francisco area.

Sometimes her work reeks just a bit too much of the lowbrow art movement on which I am not always too keen (exceptions such as Mark Ryden notwithstanding), but the work above is steeped in art history, yet feels fresh.

This painting (title: Persephone, 2002) constitutes Icon of Erotic Art number 26.

IoEA #25: man’s most honest organ

“Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is man’s most honest organ.” —Thy Neighbor’s Wife, (1981), Gay Talese.

It’s time for the 25th installment in our series of mini-articles on icons of erotic art. Today’s item is an unabashed tribute to man’s most honest organ, that wonderful extension to the human male’s groin, the wondrous complex of bulging blood vessels, the source of pride of alpha through zeta males: the penis. Here represented by Le Dieu Priape[1] (ca. 1779 – 1795) by French visionary architect and draughtsman Jean-Jacques Lequeu, it shows a large, elegant and powerful phallus. Calling it a phallus, makes it clear that the penis is erect, because let’s face it, in a flaccid state our pride is pretty preposterous.

Staying on the subject of penises, most recently Trevor Brown showed eyeing[2][3] instances of the male and female anatomy by the 21st century fantaste Paul Rumsey.

P.S. The quote of Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese came my way via a Dutch translation of Louise Kaplan’s recently acquired Female Perversions, from the first cursory reading, a very good study of female sexual behavior and its representation in psychoanalytic theory and western literature and Emma Bovary in particular.

Icons of erotic art #24, or a pale, tender rose-tint almost like that of her cheeks

Clemente Susini’s wax Venus

“Venus (or a Nymph) Spied On by Satyrs” by Poussin

In a recent post [1], on a perceived likeness between a Poussin painting and a wax anatomical model, Evan, a friend of Morbid Anatomy notes:

“I was taking in the wonderful “Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions[2],” exhibition currently up at the Metropolitan Museum, when I was struck by his famous “Venus (or a Nymph) Spied On by Satyrs”. The falling of the drapery, the hand gesture, and the blatantly revelatory pose – all very, very reminiscent of [ Clemente Susini‘s ] wax Venus models found at La Specola, the Josephinum, and beyond.” .

To me, the painting in question was reminiscent of both the 1937 novel Blue of Noon (published in 1957) by Georges Bataille and the 1838 novella One of Cleopatra’s Nights by Théophile Gautier. The latter includes a fantastic—and an undisguisedly fetishistic—description of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra‘s body post-mortem:

“Her sole vestment was the linen shroud that had covered her upon her state bed, and the folds of which she drew over her bosom as if she were ashamed of being so little clothed, but her small hand could not manage it. It was so white that the colour of the drapery was confounded with that of the flesh under the pale light of the lamp. Enveloped in the delicate tissue which revealed all the contours of her body, she resembled an antique marble statue of a bather…Dead or living, statue or woman, shadow or body, her beauty was still the same; only the green gleam of her eyes was some what dulled, and her mouth, so purple of yore, had now only a pale, tender rose-tint almost like that of her cheeks.”

The Poussin painting is Icon of erotic art #24

Do not disturb

“Can desire, the anticipation of pleasure, ever truly be photographed? No one has done it as well as Chas Ray Krider, and no one has equaled his blend of salaciousness and subtlety.” — Esparbec, writer, Paris 2007

A new book by “Motel Fetish” Chas Ray Krider

[Amazon.com]
[FR] [DE] [UK]

Chas has a blog with photos like this one. His latest book, Do not Disturb, was published by French imprint/bookseller La Musardine. For a good Esparbec cover, click here.