Tag: male nude

The Malezine – Untitled (2016)

The longest bridge in Iceland, Skeiðarárbrú, was shut down permanently several weeks back.

Built in the mid-to-late 70s, it was the final section of the Ring Road to be completed.

It bridges the Morsá–a river formed from glacial run-off and melt. The flow has ebbed and river is perhaps a generous term–it’s really more of a wide-ish rapidly running stream these days.

Iceland has a reputation as the land of fire and ice due to all the indigenous glaciers and volcanoes. The closing of the bridge stayed with me because the topic was introduced while discussing impermanence.

See: the area between Kirkjubæjarklaustur and Skaftafell will almost certain be completely washed away during the next major eruption of any of the volcanoes in that area.

I think part of why it stuck with me is that I’ve not been in a very good place mental health-wise. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering tumult, upheaval and trauma as endings. But as the saccharin pop sentiment notes (correctly, it should be added): every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end.

I’m not sure the above is any kind of masterpiece. (I’m typically not all that impressed with photo montage–my beloved Yves Klein, notwithstanding.) But, despite the ubiquity of ejaculation as a signifier of completion in pornography, I’m always felt that it has potential as the subject for fine art work.

In order to achieve that end, however, you have to recontextualize it so that it ceases to represent only an ending.

The above freezes the moment of propulsive ejaculatory force in perpetuity–a volcano forever frozen mid-eruption.

I’ve always said that if I ever shoot a hetero porn scene, I’d want the boy to come within the first minute of the scene–prematurely as it were and then let the scene demonstrate how sex in the real world is about using your words to communicate wants and needs and to negotiate expectations, disappointments, frustrations as well as passions, pleasures and desires.

Source: themalezine

teendreams – Anjelica (2013)

From the top: this is 100%, Grade A #skinnyframebullshit–there is literally no justification for this frame. (Yes, the image maker was probably thinking the top-to-bottom echoes and as such ‘enhances’ the sense of visual dynamism surrounding the act of anal penetration; I do not agree–since the downward slide on the thrusting phallus is damn near primal in it’s archetypal formation.)

Otherwise this is a reasonable well-exposed frame. Typically, for something so porn-y, there’d be a surfeit of light. And there sort of is–with the strong backlight coming through the window behind them. Still the light falls off in more or less the way you’d expect it to. (Unlike most porn, the dirtiest part of the act is not flooded with the most light… so that the viewer can discern all the graphic details. Not that you can’t see graphic sex but the image maker here trusts the viewers ability to read the image on their own without any unnecessary added direction. I like that.)

In effect, what’s been done here is this is probably still some high-end rented property in The Valley. But it’s set up to look more like a random capture from the head cheerleader and the quarterback fucking on her parents couch–while her parents are on vacation in the French Riviera or some other such shit.

I’d have preferred a wider frame to firmly ground the proceedings in a sense of place and time. Further, I think her left knee and his left knee–when not amputated–create an implicit triangle which I feel is much better at emphasizing the act of penetration.

This image also made me stop to think about the relationship between stylization in art-making vs. fueling a fantasy in pornography. Perhaps, it doesn’t really work but I feel like in any form of art making there is a degree of stylization in representation. Things are included, other things are excluded. Of the things included, there are questions about how it appears and how it will be read by the viewer, e.x. is it easier to see what he’s doing if he’s seated like this or would it be better if he were standing and turned slightly away from the viewer?

Porn on the other hand seems to universally and to a fault prioritize the presentation of the specific sex act as the top priority. And ultimately what I like so much about this image is that although I definitely do not agree with all the creative decisions–and certainly think it can be better. It does seem to at least be driven by an interest in how the image is going to be read on more or less an even field with making sure the sex act is clearly presented.

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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.