Tag: glans

Anja Gea Sladič – Title unknown (2013)

I can’t say I’m all that into Anja Gea Sladič‘s work but this is a magnificent photograph.

This is ostensibly a photo of someone with a penis masturbating. However–and I am not sure if it’s by design or because my brain is a little bit funky, but it exists as sort of a pareidolia for me; I don’t first see it as someone masturbating or even as a flower (which is actually what I thought it was at second glance), I see it–at least at first–as like one of those scenes from a Terrence Malick project where the characters are passionately and newly in love and they sensually embrace each other in the cream white light transmitted through windows in archetypal middle American single family homes.

The masculine presenting protagonist stands behind the feminine presenting love interest and they kiss and caress and at some point, hands touch her neck and circle under her chin as she’s plied slightly backwards and positioned at the best possible angle for a languid and longing kiss given the angle of the light, etc.

This clearly isn’t a chin–it’s genitalia… but for some reason I have to think of it in terms of a sensual embrace (which isn’t wrong) and as something flower-like before I can see what it is.

It’s maybe not always the best strategy to present the viewer with something it takes them a minute to parse–after all: getting someone to linger over work, to engage and think about what they are seeing is one of the prerequisites of art. This is an instance where I feel the multiplicity of interpretations actually contribute substantively to what is so effective about this piece.

Source: radarcollective.com

Mihail Nekrasov – Title Unknown (201X)

The strong right to left key light illumination and the desaturation gives this image an arty pretense.

The composition, however, does not hold up under scrutiny. There appears to be no regard for form or logical arrangement of positive/negative space–it’s a left hand, a right hand and a phallus disembodied and floating in a void.

In other words, the impetus for this image is the gesture. Yet, since gesture consists at least partly of considerations with regard to observation of form, the image ends up establishing a criteria for conceptual success it subsequently ignores in execution.

Ultimately, it’s sloppy image making.

However, I am grudgingly willing to acknowledge that it does at the least nudge my thinking in an unexpected direction; namely, the fact that in utero all fetuses are gender neutral for the first two or so months. It’s the presence/absence/mitigating levels of dihydrotestosterone which determines whether the fetus’ genitals develop into a penis, vulva or remain indeterminate.

Society makes a really fucking big deal about gender distinctions along anatomical lines. And while, yes, the anatomy looks different. The underlying structures and functionality are not actually that different.

Source: dommetoy

Source unknown – Title Unknown (20XX)

The way I feel about the Marquis de Sade is not unlike how I feel about hentai–downright irresponsible in its extremity but at the same time relevant and necessary due to its radical openness to a dizzying spectrum of non-traditional experiences.

It’s like that infamous Terrence quote: homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto, or for the non-Latin kids: I am human, and nothing of that which is human is alien to me.

Sure, that doesn’t go along way to explain tentacle sex, and I’m not going to start going out of my way to become familiar with hentai but I do feel that there’s a virtue to obsessively cataloging depravity in all it’s shapes and forms.

Yes, it’s easy to see that sort of thing as a checklist or map–a curriculum for sexual deviance. But, two counterpoints: if so, why bother–I mean isn’t the fun of it at least partly in the novelty? And, those who insufferably follow maps and extant formulas obsessively, lacks the proper imagination to truly embrace depravity.

I feel like–at its best–hentai manages to invent simple, straightforward means of depicting expressions of sexuality that are like nothing I’ve ever seen before and also vaguely synesthetic. For example, looking at this it’s almost as if I can feel it as if I were there.

Unfff.

bumblebail:

True Red

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. – ubiquitous paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 1:2

…

There’s no way around it: no matter how lovely, this is a dick pic.

Seeing it as such it’s easy to focus on the impetus for such leering color: friction? lipstick? Photoshop? I’m not really interested in that.

I am almost tempted to interrogate the close-up frame and bokeh, attribute them to a so-ascetic-as-to-be-decontextual minimalist aesthetic bent.

But my thoughts drift further afield; circle and finally alight on the concept of vanity.

…

Carly Simon would have us believe vanity is seeing oneself as the bright center of the universe around which smaller, less bright things swirl.

And any art history student worth their salt will couch things in terms of mirrors.

There is, however, a danger in conflating symbol with meaning–narcissism is decidedly self-sustaining; vanity must feed off others.

In a way, vanity requires empathy.

…

I want to double back to that matter of this being a dick pic but I feels necessary to suggest a corollary with the so-called selfie.

I am not sure it’s wrong to think of them as vain as long as it is borne in mind that the selfie can also be an ontological document–look here I am in this place-time.

I feel like what makes a shitty dick pic is narcissism combined with ontology–this is me-now, this is my desire which is your desire.

To me that is what this image does so exquisitely well: it displaces any vestige of ontology to elicit an unselfconscious perspective. There is no identity, merely a view one or any lover might glimpse of another.

Source: bumblebail