Alessandro Ruiz – Untitled (201X)
I think spending approximately 25 hours a week keeping this blog running has perhaps warped my brain to a greater or lesser extent–you know kind of like that joke Bill Murray tells in What About Bob?
Bob Wiley:
[telling a joke]
The doctor draws two circles and says “What do you see?” the guy says “Sex.”[everybody laughs]
Bob Wiley:
Wait a minute, I haven’t even told the joke yet! So the doctor draws
trees, “What do you see?” the guy says “sex”. The doctor draws a car,
owl, “Sex, sex, sex”. The doctor says to him “You are obsessed with
sex”, he replies “Well you’re the one drawing all the dirty pictures!”
Like I can’t tell you how many times I’ll be looking at something and be like wait, is that what I think it is? (It almost never is what I’m thinking, unless I’m on Tumblr and then it’s usually worse than I thought it was.)
Like with the mussed hair and pose and position of the hand above, there’s something both suggestive of masturbation and self-conscious demurring. (I can’t ascertain if Ruiz continues to have a web presence outside Model Mayhem but his work suggests that either of these readings–at a minimum–fit his works’ comportment towards eroticism.
If I were feeling pedantic I might draw a comparison between Ruiz and Erotobot–the latter is technically the superior image maker in sum but it’s a question of carefully considered composition vs. visceral immediacy. (I prefer both in tandem but since you rarely find that, I tend to favor the latter over the former.)
But while I don’t agree with the composition of this image–I do like her against the dense black background, I’d just have framed it wider than this. It did actually make me question something; namely: the notion of demureness as it pertains to social expectations placed upon women.
I’m thinking here about the religious notion I was raised with wherein the body/flesh is the locus of sin and therefore the genesis point of shame. I mean as far back as The Creation myth we see that Eve is tempted by the snake, she in turn tempts Adam and then they realize they are naked and try to cover themselves.
And it occurs to me that in the art historical, phalleocentric history of art there is a tendency to conflate a post-orgasmic languor in much the same fashion as what is the expected behavior of the properly demure.
I’m also curious as to the restraint in this image with regards to graphically explicit presentation vis-a-vis the rest of the work.
Not sure if pressed I could prove this thesis but it’s what I’m thinking about at the moment, fwiw.
Acetylene Eyes 