Tag: female nude

Musubu Nakai – Untitled (2012)

I really like this guy’s style. His compositions tend to be too busy but he has an interesting way of parsing things so that although his stuff is frequently overwhelming, it does surrender to a sort of implicit ordering structure after the initially dismaying over-stimulation.

Consider the variegated pointillism of the color here, the green red and blue of the wall, the complementary cover of the book from which the boy is reading. The subdued pink and blue of her skin; the blue of his shorts and the bluw in the pants of the person standing at the edge of frame. The red, blue and hints of green in the floor tiles.

I am, however, not 100% on-board with some of his content. The cat–which seems to be the way he inserts himself into his paintings and the young woman with her eyes closed are almost certainly a veiled reference to Balthus. (Which is very much in line with the work he’s done… notable projects include illustrating The Story of O and a lot of stuff that looks more or less like a cross between Sailor Moon and Alice in Wonderland.)

I don’t have a problem with artists depicting age appropriate sexual curiosity. Some of the aspects of this strike me as unsettlingly suggestive. The way she is naked and he isn’t suggested a sexual freedom, whereas he’s forced to hide his erection behind the book. It’s presented as a sort of seduction.  I don’t think I need to explain why that’s problematic.

But what I find unnerving is the orderly type figure standing off to the side. As if this exchange is being monitored somehow? Which given what is shown–there’s no way to spin that in a slap on the wrist sort of way. I’m not going to say that this crosses a line but it’s definitely toeing it in a way that feels irresponsible to me, somehow.

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[↑] neverlaandss – start somewhere (2015); [+] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [-] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [←] Boris Demur – Poem Flag of Spiral Deterministic Chaos in Spiral Yin Yang from Spiral Poems of a Flag series (20XX); [→] Carlos Cruz Diez – Title unknown (20XX); [_] theworldwithinthewords – for more than this is mind #12 (2017); [↖] Michael Storyteller – Stuck in the middle again (2015); [↗] Le Cam Romain – aida & jordan, paris (2015); [↙] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X) [↘] X-Art – In the Blind feat. Little Caprice (2014) … [↑] Source unknown – Title unknown feat. yhivi (201X); [+] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↓] Jonas Mekas –  As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

The way I use Tumblr is that I follow the blogs I follow and once every day I scan my dash until I get to the point where I start repeating stuff from the previous day. I like what I like as I go.

On weekends, I treat my Likes page as if it were a smaller version of my daily dash and I pull from that into Drafts.

What governs the decision to save something to drafts is almost always more of a feeling of “I need to showcase this post” more than any notion of having something structured to say about it, as it were laying there ready made in my brain.

Frequently, things make it into Drafts and I just can’t figure out what to say about them or where exactly they fit.

The above started as an effort to clear out my drafts–which is beginning to become downright cumbersome to manage. It was strictly a counting exercise. One person. Two people. Three people. Then it morphed and became not exactly storyboards but sort of a loose thumbnail index of some sort of artsy porn video.

(A digression on process. I am not in a good place right now–mental health-wise. It’s actually really bad. I feel like I have nothing really to say about anything. It’s partly that my head is a mess. And partly that it’s becoming more and more clear that my ability to express myself sexually with another human is no longer something I have recourse to in this life. Whatever. Sucks to be me, I know–but what this exercise has demonstrated to me is that there is some merit to the creative advice that you just have to force yourself to sit down and do the work. I do think there’s some truth to the idea that sitting down and staring at a blank page for eight hours day in and day out is actually very detrimental. But I think it takes a while before you get to that point–like maybe three days. The problem is we frequently won’t sit down because we expect the outcome will be negative. You gotta make time to do the work.)

Anyway, I won’t argue that what I’ve stitched together here is good or even interesting but it did suggest several thoughts.

I wonder what the ratio is of production of pornographic vs Hollywood features  in any given year? Probably at least 10-1 (porn to features), right? That’s a lot of content. I wonder why more artists don’t use it.

I mean I know some do. There’s those memes where you take porn scenes and photoshop over them so it looks like a starlet is eating an ice cream cone instead of fellating some stud. (Or, if you prefer things more arty….check out Brian Steinhoff’s Porn for the Whole Family series.)

It’s no secret that a veritable litany of art legends hired sex workers as models. So there’s even a precedent for this sort of thinking. But what I’m interested in–and another essay I’m unlikely to ever actually get around to writing: pornography as taxonomy.

Jim Malucci – Nereyda Bird for Lui Magazine (2017)

This is a veritable cornucopia of textural exquisiteness.

The chicken wire. Also, the shadow it’s casting.

The water droplets on Bird’s skin–and the variation in appearance: highlight aliased with shadow against highlight, shadow aliased by highlight on shadow.

The mottled refraction of light in the pool’s water.

Brick, concrete made to appear macadam-y.

Palm fronds.

There’s some compression going on that I suspect was introduced in post. Nereyda is noticeably separated from the water by noticeably dodging the exposure around her left side.

A remote flash unit bringing the trees in the background up a little would’ve helped make it pop even more.

The thing that I don’t understand here–and it’s really a small criticism–but with the depth of field the range of sharp focus seems to start on the shadow cast by the chicken wire–so behind the plane on which Nereyda’s face is positioned. The shadow of the chicken wire is all that is needed to convey what it is and how it relates to the overall image. I think I would’ve preferred a shallower depth of field combined with closer attention to her face. The location scans clearly whether it’s in focus or not and I think that it would’ve been better to trust the texture to sell the image than to salvage the concept of the image with selective editing that would’ve been unnecessary if the original image were made with a slightly different set of creative decisions.

Source unknown – Title unknown (1959?)

I’m intrigued by this photograph. (So much so, in fact, that I’ve spent several hours I don’t really have right now trying to learn something about it’s provenance; sadly, there’s nothing.)

The curious thing is that a lot of the blogs that have posted this generally have a lot of overlap with my own personal interests. And I have some–if we’re being polite–offbeat interests.

As far as just looking at the photo as it’s presented, I feel a lot of the things about controlling context with regards to Valerie Chiang’s All info is in the image applies equally here–even if it does work to a different end, i.e. in this case the control of context isn’t in service of clarifying anything, it’s intended to emphasize a certain enigma.

Like what I do know is that this is most likely a photo made with a 50mm lens–based on the angle of view–operated at a narrow aperture. (The focus between her chin as it’s tilted back and the ridge line in the distance suggests a wide depth of field & imposes on her a sense of being a part of the landscape a la Duchamp’s Étant donnés.)

It’s either a page from a photo album or is meant to resemble one. The 9659 is unusual. It could be a date. Sept. 6, 1959 in the US or 9 June 1959 in Europe–and to me the landscape looks straight out of central casting for Alpine Europe.

Beyond that I haven’t the foggiest. However, I do think what I find some mesmerizing about it is the contradictions it contains. There’s a level of very personal and therefore privileged/private intimacy occurring–yet the viewer is asked by the photo to bear witness. There’s the way that there is a sense that the grassy slope and trees are in the distance but with her head back like that, the distance is compressed substantially.

Also, compositionally this is absolutely the opposite of #skinnyframe bullshit–it’s intended to be read up and down and is arranged in such a fashion as to facilitated the parsing of such a reading. consider how it’s divided into five distinct horizontal bands: the sky, the trees, the area between the crest of the hill and her shoulders, between his middle finger and pinky finger with his pinching of her nipple drawing attention to both nipples and the area below watch band wrapped around the wrist of the intruding hand.

It’s a really compelling construction. And although I can’t find fuck all out about this I would very much love to know more if anyone has any pointers.

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.

Source: defiantly-yourss

Romy Alizée – Je sais que tu me regardes (2016)

Originally, my thought had been to post the above side by side with this image (by fuckingfilthyminds).

My interest was contrasting the degrees of abstraction vs contextual clarity in the two images. (The above is better, the linked image diminishes context in favor of both anonymity and to encourage an experiential POV perspective for the viewer–which makes the classic cishet mistake of assuming the entire rest of the world is straight like you.)

The linked image is technically superior–the flash above isn’t overexposed in the foreground and almost over-exposed against the white wall in the background but at the same time there’s no texture whatsover in the cushions on the couch. I’d give it a pass except the way that her head bleeds out into the cushions in a way that’s just sloppy.

Unfortunately, the other blog is fairly clear about their desire not to have the images copied and posted. And the image I wanted to post is at the tail end of a post where the quality of the images is just inexcusably and narcissistically bad.

Source: the-room-got-heavy