Tag: fingering

Hans Bellmer – Studies for Georges Bataille’s L’histoire de l’oeil (1946)

Beyond a generalized outline and the Freudian psychoanalytic babble about the more unsettling aspects of his work–erotomania, pedophilia, etc.–my gut feeling is that the majority of art historians really get Bellmer all wrong.

It’s a bit too facile to call him a perverted pedophile–I won’t argue that his work doesn’t support these claim but only pursuing it to the point of dismissing him for his proclivities is perhaps cutting of one’s nose to spite one’s face. (Especially when you realize that almost all of his work that incites cries of pedophilia was a response to the cult of the perfect body in Germany circa the 1930s.)

The thing I think it’s important to keep in mind is how Bellmer repeatedly situated his work to stand firmly in a position counter to authoritarianism.

I find the Freudian analyses of him and his work even more frustrating–with their insistence on interpreting surrealist images as coded subconscious projections, i.e. Bellmer was a repressed homosexual (at that I have to question whether the person making that claim has ever even really looked at his work in more than a cursory fashion, he’s very much obsessed with female sexuality in a way that no gay man I know is…)

There’s talk of oedipal anxieties and fear of castration–and while both fit into the anti-authoritarian locus of his work, I read things differently. I feel a sort of shared experience with Bellmer–an overarching sadness at AMAB status and a sort of erotomania as the only perceived means of recovering some of the experience of what it might be to experience sexual awakening in a manner suiting your actual gender identity.

I feel like so much of Bellmer’s work is actually more literally anti-authoritarian than most people realize–because it channels a frustration with authoritarianism where your experience is limited by being born into the wrong body.

Further, non-consensual interactions are the bread and butter of both authoritarianism and pedophilia. I don’t know for sure that Bellmer had his head entirely screwed on straight in this regard–but I can’t see that he wouldn’t have been unaware of it. And while the stories of him hiring young girls to pose provocatively for him are unsettling, I’m reasonably sure that the resulting images would most likely be to unsettling to serve as pornographic material and I think that fact is crucial in understanding Bellmer and his work.

…

On a slightly different note, given the ascendancy of Drumpf in my own country, I think Bellmer is an artist not only due an in depth re-evaluation but who also has a great deal to offer on the subject of how art should strive to fight fascism. (If there are an gallerists reading this: Ana Mendieta is another artist who needs a major retrospective stat.) 

Source: lapetitemelancolie.wordpress.com

Kerstin Drechsel – Untitled from if you close the door series (2009)

With the exception of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, I’m not all that fond of expressionism.

In fairness, I can’t imagine Drechsel fancies herself an expressionist. But I think there’s an argument to be made that while if you close the door starts off more classically photo-realistic as it becomes more enmeshed in the private experiences of loves, it begins to disintegrate into something that shares elements of expressionism.

I love how the work is at once both graphic and implicit. The sometimes fumbling awkwardness of the exchanges.

Take this image: I can’t get over the matching knickers. The way each partner is stimulating the other and holding the other at a distance. (The one on the left in an effort to watch her lovers body and the one on the right because she is approaching orgasm–note the way the partner on the right has her lips parted but at the same time this expression is partly elided by the clumsy shadow her partner is casting across her face.

I also really like the vaginal shape of the composition. It’s not at all subtle but in the context of the work it’s a powerful statement about whom and for what purpose the work was created (i.e. it wasn’t made for white cishet dudes to objectify).

Source: vane.org.uk

Crystal Zapata – Don’t Be Afraid of Yourself II (2014)

I am in love with this image. Seriously, I know mid-career artists who aren’t as conceptually cohesive, direct and unequivocal.

And Zapata isn’t about holding the hands of anyone who misses the ostensible point:

I’ve never had such a hard time trying to make art. Lately, I’ve been
trying to figure out what it is that I actually care about. As it turns
out, I am a woman. I can go on for a while about all of the things that
anger me about our social construct, but all I will say is fuck the
media and fuck history for telling me that I have to be a pretty,
flawless, sexual being, when my own sexuality is taboo.

This image should not shock you. I see photos of sexualized women
hundreds of times per day, so why is THIS considered inappropriate?
Question your surroundings.

Awesome and profoundly relatable.

Source: crystalzapata

Hans Bellmer – Study for Georges Bataille’s L’Histoire de l’oeil (1946)

Bellmer is one of a handful of artists that I don’t really know how to talk about.

I know more people are put off by his sadistic bent and his obsessed penchant for depicting sexualized pubescent female bodies.

I’ll never argue that the vast majority of his work isn’t pornography and I think that to the extent that it includes children, such work is actually unconscionably irresponsible.

The trouble is that the work is of an unusually high quality. Much of it has–rightly, in my mind–earned the distinction of Capital-A Art.

So the question is: does being of an exceptionally high quality give the work a pass when it comes to elements that toe over the line in terms of child pornography?

My background is academic. But–if I may confess something: I’m not a good academic. I have no patience for genuflecting at that Freudian shrine. Yes, the man suggested and subsequently implemented a ‘functional’ framework for quasi-scientific analysis. But the framework was gallingly sexist, heteronormative and largely misguided.

The criticism on Bellmer bends itself into pretzel shapes similar to several of his Dolls, trying to use Freudian notions or Sue Taylor’s ‘feminist’ defense of the artist or Catherine Grant’s Bellmer as ‘queer doubler’ tact.

I can abide pieces of each attempt to justify Bellmer but I can’t really follow them down the garden path to their various conclusions. It’s too much heavy lifting for something that in my mind doesn’t require it.

To my way of seeing, history is Bellmer’s justification. Think of that Picasso quip made when his portrait of Gertrude Stein was criticized because she did not look like her image: she will.

Bellmer’s rage against fascism and the cult of the perfect body do not read as if they’ve dated in 70 years. They very much fit in with the Tumblr erotica vein and with the current emergence of this sort of misplaced hipster nostalgia, these images could have been made a month or two ago. (Note: they’d still stand head and shoulders above similar modern images.)

Ultimately, what I appreciate about Bellmer is that–like Balthus–the mission of his work was to disturb. However, unlike Balthus–who one has the feeling was almost always the smartest person in any room her entered–Bellmer was open and in your face about the considerations underlying the work, while Balthus strenuously avoided any attempt to fuel equivocations about his motivations.

I find it curious that critics are so willing to give Balthus a pass but grin and rub their hands together when it comes to crucifying Bellmer. Yes, Balthus’ work is arguably of greater quality. But there’s something tempestuous, resonant and grotesquely messy to Bellmer. It’s as if Balthus sought to prompt people to ask better questions so that they might receive better answers; while Bellmer was more interested in leading folks to nothing more than being happy with better questions in the face of a world which is incapable of providing anything like what we think of when we think of an answer.

Source: tonguedepressors

lusting-and-thrusting:

Samantha-fucking-Saint

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

After my first encounters with porn, I rapidly developed a abusive relationship with it. Namely, my curiosity regarding it always seemed to outweigh the loathing and alienation it triggered.

There was a local video rental chain with a location within walking distance of my house. After some cautious prodding, I realized that several of the staff members didn’t give fuck one when it came to determining whether or not I was old enough to rent items from their enormous back room.

Thus by the time I was sixteen I was renting two or three XXX videos a month.

Amazingly, I found some stuff that if I didn’t necessarily like, it certainly interested me. In particular, a gonzo series called New Faces, Hot Bodies–made by, if memory serves a Cleveland based kink smut purveyor named Bob Bright–never failed to pique my interest.

As I remember it was the diversity of the scenes that fascinated me. In any one tape, there would be a range of scenes from vanilla to hardcore and bizarre kink fetish.

I believe a testament to how different they were is that I can still vividly remember a number of scenes from the series. One was my first introduction to bukkake–in the scene five to eight studs ejaculated at least 3 times a piece over a young woman while two other women used spoons to collect the semen off her body so as to feed it to her.

In another scene in the first video I from the series I ever viewed, there was a parenthetical return to the first scene. The lead in said something like fifteen minutes after we last saw them and then the couple went for round two.

I found the second scene unbelievably hot. It didn’t matter that it had likely been filmed on two separate days. The imposed continuity and the notion that the scene didn’t end just because the guy blew his load really turned me on.

…

It was another five or so years before I saw anything similar. It was one of those videos that makes you feel a little uncomfortable watching. Low production values, with most of the shooting budget going to acquire a superficially opulent location and then the performers being paid in drugs.

The performers were clearly coked out of their brains. The guy was fucking like a spastic jack hammer. He pulls out, ejaculates so forcefully the first two spurts shoot over the woman’s head and end up on the carpet. He immediately starts rubbing his glans around the woman’s clitoris, while a small puddle of come leaks out of his cock and then he promptly reinserts and continues as if he’s just getting going.

…

All this is by way of saying I like deviations from the straight cisgendered heteronormative porn script. For example, in the image above it’s clear that guy has already ejaculated forcefully on the woman–who the captions say is Samantha Saint but I remain unconvinced of that attribution; yet, the scene clearly continues while he ensures that she gets off.

Yes, the notion that sex has to result in orgasm for both parties is also fundamentally heteronormative but it’s one of those things that although micro-ly problematic, still–for me at least–represents a decided improvement on the status quo.

Henrique Santos  – Title unknown (201X)

Dear whoever-made-this:

I love it. LOVE it. Have you ever thought about making it a t-shirt?

I’d buy three. No lie–because I love the design and what it shows but moreso for the fact that when asked about how I identify my sexual orientation I could point to this instead of trying to use words that feel awkward, short-sighted and confining.

Keep making awesome work!

AE

Source: iblackbutterflies

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

In general, I dislike close-ups. Yes, the can serve a purpose but sadly we’ve all but lost the work ethic and attention to detail/nuance/context in contemporary image making.

Close-ups in porn tend to be even worse–the reduction of physical intimacy to acontextual intersections of genitalia.

There’s something different about this, however. Yes, it’s #skinnyframebullshit–no, the framing is not logically coextensive with the notion of leaving some things to inference. But, between the way the flush in her cheeks shifts her skin tone toward the shade of her lips, the way her mascara-ed lashes highlight her fixation on the way she is experiencing sans boundary the body of another being is fascinating.

To me there’s a palpable sense of awe in a moment of unrestrained fulfillment of experiential curiosity. This resonates on a primal level with my first experience of sexually exploring a lover–and that’s something that’s super rare for me to encounter in porn; thus, when I do see it, I make a point of celebrating it.

This is lovely and hot as fuck. And if it fails as art, there is something intrinsic to it that has the potential to become the subject of artistic expression.

Hans Bellmer – Title Unknown (19XX)

Individual perversion and obsession are so inextricably interpenetrative that it’s difficult to judge where the former ends and the latter begins.

Bellmer positions his paraphilias front and center, pulls no punches and generally gives zero fucks about your puny concern fappy ‘moral’ outrage. There is definitely an off-putting integrity to an artist who doesn’t bother to sublimate the fact that he’s fixated on the sexual potential of pubescent female bodies.

(Of note: Bellmer shares this predilection with Balthus. However, unlike Bellmer, Balthus refused to engage conversations regarding the ‘hebephiliac‘ themes in his work. As such, it’s interesting that while Bellmer is the better technician, Balthus’ enjoys wider cultural renown.)

It’s all fucking enormously problematic. And I’m never sure how to address that because there always seem to be some unshakeable truth transcending binary gender identification and either/or sexual orientation which his line work always seems to be struggling to give expression to. As if Bellmer believed in the depth of his soul the grotesque is the veil one must penetrate to truly experience the sacredness of beauty.

Source: boticabotica