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.

World music classics #13

Runaway Love (1978) – Linda Clifford

Linda Clifford’s 1978 album, If My Friends Could See Me Now produced two of Clifford’s biggest hit and put her on the music map. The first single, Runaway Love became an R&B hit peaking at #3 for two weeks. It was released as a 9:44 twelve inch on Curtom Records, written produced and arranged by Gil Askey, mixed by Jim Burgess. The lyrics (in the twelve inch version, not on the album version) dealt with female liberation.

Icons of erotic art #5

Today I present the 2006 painting Rotterdam by American artist John Currin.

As I’ve explained before, most works of erotic art aren’t really erotic at all in the strictest sense. The strictest sense being that the works actually sexually arouse you. Today’s work is truly erotic. This also and inevitably means that it borders on the pornographic. It is then not a coincidence that this painting is from a series by John Currin based on late 20th century Scandinavian pornographic photos. A good French language analysis is over at lemateurdart.

Notes

Hans_Baldung_Grien_The_Young_Woman_and_Death_Dornai

Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives) died, so did Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead) a couple of days ago. Above is an image by Grien celebrating one of my favorite themes: death and the maiden. The painting is probably a detail of a larger – unidentified – piece. I had never seen a painting with a blindfolded baby. Tip of the hat for the painting: Morbid Anatomy.

No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.

–Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles

Carnography #3

Terror Blu

The Black Champion

Although Curt’s of Groovy Age is no longer personally digging the crates for transgressive Italian fumetti, his Scandinavian (I assume) correspondent Jaakko has taken over the helm. It is quite impossible to imagine that these Terror Blu comics would be sold today anywhere in the Western world today, except maybe Japan.

Virginia, 1812. Tom the slave is about to be hanged for raping his owner’s daughter, even though Tom swears the girl is lying.

Read the rest of the Black Champion here.

The Kingdom of Tenderness

  La Carte du Tendre

The above is not a somatopos, i.e. an instance of somatopia.

It is a Map of tenderness featured in the first volume of the Madeleine de Scudéry novel Clélie, published in 1654. The map details the distractions and pitfalls—depicted as towns and landmarks—that lovers encounter along their journey from New Friendship (the town at the bottom center of the map) to intimacy in the Kingdom of Tenderness.

At the moment, I am trying to stay clear of the lake of indifference.

World music classics #12

Where Did You Sleep Last Night  (1870s) – traditional

I wanted to let you hear the version that made this song popular to me, by my favourite Charlie Feathers (who recorded it on the French label New Rose Records in the late 1980s), but it’s not available on Youtube. The clip above mixes between Lead Belly (who made it popular in 1944) and Nirvana (who made it popular in the late 20th century). The lyrics are difficult to grasp: a girl is unfaithful, a man is decapitated, his body never found.

From Youtube:

“Cobain started to love leadbelly after the words of his biggest hero William S. Burroughs :
(Kurt Cobain’s words) “I remember him saying in an interview, “These new rock’n’roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul, like Lead Belly.””

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