Sebastián Gherrë – Benja (2016)
I feel about Gherrë the way I’ve come to feel about Araki–namely: I don’t always get it but the work is consistently of high quality and in spite of the tendency for both artists to cover the same ground over-and-over-and-again, there remains surprising freshness and variation.
Also, I love that there’s someone out there who is still making traditional dark room prints. They just look so much better, damn it.
Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)
There are definitely essayists who are more formal, more critical, more highfalutin–but very few people approach writing with Rebecca Solnit’s firm belief in the potential of the marriage of words to ideas as a means of sparking curiosity, that most tantalizing precursor to wonderment.
In other words, she doesn’t treat her reader as if they are an empty vessel she is intended to fill with her great and varied knowledge. She suggests revelatory parallels, indulges lapses, digressions and exists fascinatingly somewhere between narrative and a sort of liberal arts whirligig. She’s dazzling to read; often bordering on transcendent. (She’s the sort of writer I dream of being.)
I can’t help but look at this image in the context of her most recent collection of essays The Encyclopedia of Troubles and Spaciousness–specifically Journey to the Center.
It’s the second piece she’s written about Icelandic artist Elín Hansdóttir‘s PATH installation–which is a pitch dark labyrinth setup in a gallery that one person enters to explore at a time.
On the matter of light and dark, Solnit observes that generally we are afraid of darkness and that one of the many things Elín Hansdóttir is interrogating is the notion of darkness as generative instead of detrimental–much as those spaces where piles of snow are last to melt, is also where the grass comes in greener and faster than anywhere else.
Of light, she notes:
Darkness is amorous, the darkness of passion, of your unknowns
rising to the surface, the darkness of interiors, and perhaps part of what
makes pornography so pornographic is the glaring light in which it
transpires, that and the lack of touch, the substitution of eyes for
skin, of seeing for touching.
This is not a good image. It’s somewhere between what I’d term a medium shot and a close-up. And while you can ascertain what’s going on–a fairly blase, heteronormative FFM scene–it manages to neither focus on the impending penetration nor provides any sort of coherent check-in with what’s going on in the broader scene. (In other words, the camera needs to be either two feet closer or two feet further back for this scene to make sense as a still image; whether or not it was intended as a still image is immaterial–whether they are moving or still the general stipulations with regard to the grammar of an image are analogous, respectively, to writing a speech versus public oratory.)
So if It’s not a good image why are you posting it. Well, simply because if you only consider selective parts of the frame, the light really is sort of gorgeous. The way the oblique light kisses the engorged corona of his cock is effing breath-taking. The delightful illumination rendering the lower woman’s rump with a supple dimensionality; the gorgeous skin tone it brings out along her back.
In other words, the frame improves as the contrivance of the glaring light source diminishes across a distance and is blocked by objects which diffuse it, introduce shadows and texture.
Laurent Benaim – Title unknown (2015)
I do not believe home
is where we’re born, or the place we grew up, not a birthright or an
inheritance, not a name, or blood or country. It is not even the soft
part that hurts when touched, that defines our loneliness the way a bowl
defines water. It will not be located in a smell or taste or talisman
or a word…Home is our first real mistake. It is the one error that changes
everything, the one lesson you could let destroy you. It is from this
moment that we begin to build our home in the world. It is this place
that we furnish with smell, taste, a talisman, a name.—Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault
Otto Schmidt – Untitled (189X)
The above sampling of Schmidt’s work was posted by @vensuberg with the following note appended:
I’m posting these three pictures by Otto Schmidt to advertise another of Sparismus’ blogs, here.
The pictures there are generally of this type, about half by Schmidt
and considerable graphic material as well. Also the scans are much
better than he is able to manage on his regular Schmidt series and tend
to be about 6000×6000 (three times the resolution tumblr will post
these).
If you like your smut turn-of-the-century vintage with a dash of too-cool-for-art-school, then you’d do well to follow them.
…
I was unfamiliar with Schmidt prior to seeing this but his work is intriguing. There’s an attention to depth of field (particularly in the top photo of what might be referred to as a cunnilingus pyramid) and control of overall tonal range which both suggest a familiarity with the photo avant-garde. Also, the blocking and positing suggests the photographer was extensively familiar with art history–particularly oil painting.
One might quibble that the commitment to fitting pornographic content to classical forms, detracts somewhat from the erotic effect of the work. I can see that and absolutely think that one of the struggles in trying to produce work that is Capital A Art with the pornographic depiction of sexuality as its subject is to carefully balance concept, form and technique with a carefully considered execution that leaves room for ruptures, disjunctions and spontaneity. (For example: although sterile and awkwardly over-posed the cunnilingus pyramid does end up reading as playful.)
Inside Flesh – Title Unknown (2016)
If you’re at all familiar with music criticism, you know that generally there are three templates for artists with long careers of making continual relevant, ground breaking work:
If Inside Flesh can be said to be following any of the above trajectories, it would be #1.
To me, that’s not just interesting–it’s surprising. Let me attempt to explain what I mean…
I’ve always appreciated IF’s aesthetic. But I’ve always worried that it’s a little too rigidly circumscribed–the whole glitching, industrial hell thing seemed to me that it would become cloying at a rather quick clip.
Quite the opposite, in fact: it feels like someone exploring the interstices between art and pornography could do worse than to immerse themselves in IFs oeuvre.
What I’ve noticed is a degree of conceptual recursion in their work. The limitations of their aesthetic are frequently mirrored in a certain heteronormative predisposition in their work. For example: they have a lot of scenes like this, where the viewer sees an nearly disembodied phallus vaginally penetrating a definitely embodied woman. (I really like that their frames tend to include the entirety of the woman’s body within the frame.)
However, there are two things that distinguish IF from most straight porn:
In their artist statements IF refers to their ongoing preoccupation with “human carnality in all its aspects.”
I know they are based in Poland. But I can’t help seeing what their doing as a sort of radical fuck you to on going policing of sex workers by ‘well-intending’ fuckwits–I’m thinking specifically of the AIDS Healthcare Foundations utterly ridiculous ballot initiative that would empower private citizens to personally sue adult performers not wearing a condom in adult media.
I am about as against the contrived Puritanical prudery that suggests sex is a sin in the eyes of some deity as a means of dodging unwanted pregnancy, disease, eternal damnation, etc., as one person can possibly be. When it comes to sex positivity, I err on the side of over-the-top. I think people who enjoy sex should have more and better sex.
By the same token, I find the sort of heteronormative no risks/all reward notion of sex perpetuated by most mainstream pornography to be only a bit less repugnant. I mean how many times have you watched a scene where a cable guy or plumber shows up to fix something and upon finding the person with the troubles is scantily clad and horny, things progress to sex with little if any flirting, communication or foreplay. It’s pure simulacrum.
But although it’s fantasy, and part of the fantasy is the randomness and availability, the context indicates that there should be behavior in place that pays attention to safer sex. (I say ‘safer ‘specifically because I don’t think there is any such thing as 100% safe sex–at least if your doing it right by recognizing that risk is an intrinsic feature to anything in life truly worth doing–and vulnerability, connection and giving expression to unfiltered desire are all risks; plus, the queer milieu in which I maneuver, I don’t know a single person who uses dental dams or condoms when performing oral sex.
My point is you choose your level of risk and accept the consequences. It’s not really anyone else’s call to make.
Yet, I feel like whereas most porn would argue against condoms for being elements that pull the viewer out of the fantasy, their absence in feels like a radical decision to experience the extremity of human carnality.
And it’s true: safe sex is good sex. But there’s something about unsafe sex that is completely immersive. (It’s like the difference between the hallucinations associated with mushrooms vs LSD–when I’m shrooming, I always remember I’m shrooming, when I’m tripping on acid, I sometimes lose site of the fact that I’m hallucinating–interestingly, I don’t especially like LSD.)
Like you can feel the smallest changes in engorged rigidity, changes in the viscosity of vaginal mucus, the slow build up of clenching and unclenching micro contractions, the warm surge of unrestrained ejaculation.
Really, I think it’s exactly these sorts of intangibles that IF is trying to convey in their work.
Madeleine Froment – Untitled from Accord/#1 DM series (201X)
I make a pretty solid effort when it comes to familiarizing myself with the work of the artists I post here.
Frequently, I find that while a particular image resonates it seemingly telegraphs to my eye that the I will end up considering the rest of the work an–at best–mixed bag.
It’s frustratingly rare to find work which truly fans the flames of my curiosity.
But when @reverdormir2 posted this drawing by Froment, I was immediately taken by it; I don’t know, I think it’s the obsessive and perhaps even a little awkward details of the hair–the way her hair obscures her face, the careful rendering of the hair on his back, arms and legs, the texture of his beard contrasting against her tightly cropped pubic hair.
I clicked over to her web site and promptly dropped into a sensual erotic K-hole for the better part of an hour.
For the record, not all of her stuff works. But unlike the majority of intellectually dishonest wannabe creatives out there, she doesn’t foist the work on her audience despite its flaws. Instead, she presents the work in a fashion that patiently bridges the gap for the audience between the impetus for the work, the details that drive and enliven it–all subsequently recontextualized in the final work.
It’s really goddamn ingenious. However, what makes it even more exceptional is the degree to which Froment understands her own aesthetic peculiarities and formulates her installations in such a way as to further compliment it, but to also enrich the complex relationship between the work and the world it inhabits.
If you think I’m being a pretentious blowhard and talking out of my ass, just browse through her website and notice how the work flows from documentary like snapshots, to more refined images which in turn provide prima materia for her spare, meticulous drawings. Note: also the holistic way each project is presented to emphasize how the work is supposed to be viewed–ethereal (representative) vs actual (representational).
This is extremely high end work. And it’s thrilling to see an artist this young and this preoccupied with the sort of topics that I think are all too often excluded from artistic discourse–much to the detriment of Capital A Art, unfortunately.
Source unknown – Title unknown (197X)
I am half agony, half hope.
— Jane Austen, Persuasion
Barahona Possolo – Sweet (2013)
I love this.
Stylistically, it wouldn’t be out of pace displayed side-by-side with any of Caravaggio’s biblical paintings. (In fact, there would be a reasonably interesting paper comparing/contrasting the influence of both Caravaggio (with a distinction between his biblical vs mythological work) and Klimt‘s paintings after 1900 in Possolo’s work.)
Granted, such explicitly suggestive depictions don’t really exist in the Western Art Historical Canon. There certainly aren’t rigidly errect penii in Caravaggio–however, I believe there may be a few lurking in Klimt’s criminally under-appreciated sketches.
But my point here (as well as with this blog) is there is no reason there couldn’t be/shouldn’t be graphic depictions of sex in art.
And that’s not to say this completely works. Ostensibly, the fellow on the top left is ladling honey out of one of wide mouth wine glass with a wooden spoon and letting it drip onto the engorged glans of the man on the lower left. (Note: the wine glass bears more than a passing resemblance reminds me to a similar object in Vermeer’s The Wine Glass.)
On the right half of the frame, you have the exuberantly performative excitement/delight of the guy on the top and the transfixed and lets be honest clearly thirsty AF woman on the lower right.
Some of the other facets are much more difficult to decode. Like–there’s a feeling that all the men in the image are aware of each other but the woman seems oblivious to everything except the honey marinated hard-on. (Let’s be honest, that is the locus here.) This conjecture is at least supported by the strange elf like ears all the men have.
I’m not really sure what the bumble bee on the woman’s flank indicates either–given the context of the image it seems it could speak to her sexuality and contrast that against the seeming ambiguity of the elf-eared ones; yet if that’s the case there are potential ways in which it could be interpreted that the image erases gay, lesbian and bisexual women. (And that’s not ever cool.)
But what really strikes me about this image–and like so much of the way my brain works this isn’t an association I would have made if I hadn’t read this article several days ago–the way he of the honey slicked dick breaks the fourth wall reminds me of the way Robert Mapplethorpe performs a similar action in (arguably) his most notorious image. It’s as if both are saying: this is who I am. But in the case of this painting there’s an insouciance and arrogance in contrast to Mapplethorpe’s studied gravitas.
Murielle Scherre – J’fais du porno et j’aime ça (2009)
If you’ve followed this blog for any time, you’ll have likely figured out that one of my primary fixations is how the alleged dichotomy between porn and art is total horse shit.
And I’m not imply that this is art–wherever it’s from, some thought went into making it (both the original scene and the subsequent gif loop).
But it raises an interesting point by implication or does so for me; namely: how depressingly formulaic depictions of sexuality tend to be in the cinema.
Its a nuanced, multi-valent consideration what with the dearth of any substantive male nudity to speak of. (Not looking at you, Tom Hardy. Keep up the excellent work, sir.)
But while we are getting more hanging dong, it’s mostly flaccid, incidental dick. Whereas you can bet that if a woman is naked in a film that she’s either just had sex with a man or is about to have sex with a man. It’s wearying.
And then there’s the chaste way that sex scenes are shot: the viewer is offered a view of the action including a full view of the woman with enough suggestive footage to make sure it’s clear what’s happening and then cut to post-coitus.
I guess that’s why I’ve always appreciate Lars von Trier. The way he shoots sex scenes is always slightly salacious but at the same time at least honest about human curiosity.
Ultimately, that’s what I like about this loop. It’s not subtle. You see a hard cock being fellated but the way it’s put together gives it a context, i.e. a couple in a movie theater.
I, for one, would love to start seeing sex scenes like this in R-rated films. Because yes, we do absolutely need to start creating a place for non-sexualized female nudity; but at the same time we need to balance out the historical tendency of editing out phalluses.
The Art of Blowjob – Title unknown feat. Camille Crimson (201X)
So much of porn is an either or proposition. Gay or Straight. Softcore or Hardcore.
It’s not the extremes necessarily bother me. Sometimes I really want something like this as a ‘palette cleanser’.
Usually though I’m more like Goldilocks when it comes to porn in general and straight porn in particular–I want something that’s somewhere in the middle.
Alas, I find myself alienated more often than titillated.
That’s why I want to single this out. Depictions of oral sex in straight porn tend to be either passive and perfunctory or gag-inducing extreme irrumatio.
This appeals to me. Yeah, it does have that even illumination characteristic of porn but there’s some natural shadowing, too; but, it’s a pretty frame. (I’d have liked it even more if the camera was maybe a foot and a half back–but that’s splitting hairs.)
But the aesthetics aren’t what draws me in. What gets me is that these people seem to really want to be doing what they’re doing. He’s thrusting upward and she’s sliding downward. To be blunt–it’s representative of what sex is like when sex is at it’s best: collaborative.
Who knows if the rest of the scene continues this sort of feeling? Either way I’d still be interested in knowing where it’s from… so if anyone has any idea, please pass the info along.
Acetylene Eyes 