defiantly-yourss – Some friendly fingers 🐶 (2017)

The above is a Fuji Instax Mini Monochrome instant photograph.

I’ve always been a fan of instant film–the unpredictable peccadilloes of the process contribute an unmediated in-the-momentness to them. It’s partly the singularity of the original–yes, you can scan them or snap a picture of them with your phone (but that one be the same; essentially, there’s only one true original.

Whether it was intended or not, this has always facilitated a special relationship between instant photography and DIY porn making.

(Honestly, if there was a browser plugin that filtered out mainstream pornography and only allowed DIY work through, I’d be thrilled. Diminish the profit motive and it seems like this girl’s enjoyment of things increases, but also ostensibly there’s less premeditation on what will sell the most units, earn the most clicks and it’s focused on what the producer likes and perhaps also what the target audience–whether a person or a small community–enjoys just seems to me to come across as not only more immersive but more authentic.)

Yet, of all things this also got me thinking about the received wisdom that art and pornography are mutually exclusive. (There’s a stellar piece, Museums, Urban Detritus and Pornography, written by Paul B. Preciado (formerly Beatrix), which has been seminal influence on this blog.)

It’s been a bit of shit week for me and I was wracking my brain for something to say about this. (A common misconception is that I just find something I like and then spew convincing BS about it and call it a post. I won’t deny that that happens on the off occasion. But for the most part, the stuff I post is posted because I have something to say about it.)

With this I knew I wanted to post it–that it belonged here–however, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say about it.

Then it occurred to be that while this is an explicit image, it’s not especially graphic. Genital penetration by multiple fingers is clearly implied but not graphically illustrated. And that’s kind of the strength of the photo: the basics are clear but the specifics are amorphous.

This encourages the viewer to fill in the blanks–and I use that in spite of the clumsy pun.

I started to wonder how many fingers are inserted. You can’t tell but it specifically says fingers plural. For some reason I thought of the tradition of depicting Christ in oil paintings–with his thumb extended and index and middle finger raised in a sign of blessing. (Bonus points for the art history nerds out there: apparently this was because this finger placement is like a gang sign that reads IC XC–the first and last letters of ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ in ancient Greek.)

It being a sign of blessing is definitely in keeping with the above image. And that got me thinking about how ecumenical tradition tends to take extant symbols and appropriates them for religious use. Xtianity is all but a carbon copy of the ancient Mithras cult, for example.

The Xtian cross symbol originates from what is termed a Roman or Latin cross and became–after the apostle Peter demanded to be crucified upside down to prove his piety and that he was not anything like Christ–the Petrine Cross. Thus a symbol of imperial violence is appropriated by early Xtians, then appropriated again by the Catholic Church (in it’s upside down variant) before being flipped right side up again only to be re-appropriated as a bit of anti-Xtian imagery nowadays.

I realize this isn’t the most un-specious of arguments but I think it works given the way the majority of wisdom traditions have de-emphasized individual experience of the divine with a sort of ersatz groupthink instead. The fact that drugs and sexuality can–given the right environment–be a stepping stone to self-transcendent experience. The powers that be are very much invested in using religion to wall off that option from the majority of people.

Lastly, I’ve had this notion for a while that landscape oriented imagery tends to be secular in nature whereas vertical oriented stuff tends to be more liturgical–I think this digression is actually very much in the spirit of the original Instax.