Tag: porn

Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)

Originally, I had some profound notion I wanted to share re: this but whatever connection I made has gotten scrambled by the worst sinus infection I’ve had in probably a decade. (I’m miserable–feel free to send coconut seltzer, bulk cannabis or one of those fancy original hitachi wands.)

The only thing I can think to say about this now that this post is a Damocles sword swaying over my head: I like the way her vulva/labia are the exact same color as his foreskin. There’s some extra magenta in that same area but mostly the rest of her skin is more orange and yellow while his skin is more orange and red.

Also, something I’ve noticed from the overlap between still photography and cinematography is that the way things are arranged in an image suggests something about a relationship with time. If a character walks from left to right across a frame, this usually relates to a passage of time from the present into the future. (With some exceptions in Japanese film–and they are less exceptions than complications) The tendency is movement from right to left in a frame suggests either a movement back in time or a restatement, clarification or some sort of nostalgia.

The balance of suggested motion in this–regardless of what is transpiring (probably a creampie, knowing porn)–is right to left; which contributes a contemplative cast to the image. At least to me–in my current state of nanobots raised by weasels sloshing around in my sinuses.

Source: hot-day-at-the-beach

Author unknown – Title Unknown (192X?)

Things I like about this:

  1. The corner of the room behind the divan at the left edge of the frame;
  2. The wallpaper,
  3. The way genitals in encircled by open mouth a smidgen north of the exact center of the frame;
  4. The garter with white bow relieving the black stocking of weight that would’ve otherwise unbalanced the composition;
  5. The way she’s looking at the camera;
  6. The eye moves over this in a very interesting fashion–left to right (taking in the tableau), upon reaching the right edge, there is a much more forcible momentum right to left–the backward trajectory reinforces the joining of bodies and then the angle of her hear and the downward jutting of her right arm creates this whipping loop where the viewer’s gaze cycles counter clockwise from arm, through rump, through the nexus of connection again and again.
  7. Zoom in close and you’ll see that the sort of silver highlights throughout the image are actually a result of where fingers pressed into the emulsion leaving the oily residue of fingerprint.

Lastly, a counterpoint on the why the eye parses this frame: there is no sense that there is a continuity beyond the edge of the frame, thus the exclusion of the woman on the left’s right forearm and hand represents an amputation, a symbolical removal of autonomous agency. (Her foot is similarly maimed.) No matter the cleverness of the way the work cycles the gaze–these women are definitely meant to perform for the male gaze.)

Source: oldtimepleasure
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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.

Richard Prince – Untitled from Censored Art series (2011)

Richard Prince is the reigning king of appropriation in the art world.

He’s made a career of stealing work from other artists without permission. This can take the form of rephotographing an image–Sam Abell’s cigarette ad vs Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy). And there was the recent kerfuffle where Prince took images created by others on Instagram, more or less as is, and sold them as his own work.

I’m not someone who dismisses what Prince does entirely out of hand. I mean consider the quote that’s frequently (and inconclusively–to the best of my knowledge) attributed to Oscar Wilde about talent borrowing and genius stealing–and you have to accept Prince’s work merely as proof of concept.

And although he’s definitely an entitled white, cishet asshole, there is some conceptual merit to his interrogations. With his appropriation of Abell’s photo, he introduces notions of authorship/ownership and the relationship between process and commodification in the advertising world vs. in the art world.

Similarly, his selling of Instagram images he did not make, can be interpreted as the art industry paying exorbitant sums for work that is unoriginal/stolen or worse. Also, it presents questions about who owns the copyright for work displayed on social media sites. (I’m sure everyone reading this has gotten those concerned messages about whether or not uploading work to Flickr or FB will result in losing one’s All Rights Reserved proviso.

The problem with the Instagram business was he primarily stole work from young women–which is very different than stealing corporate art from a tobacco company.  (For example: there’s continued disagreement on the appropriateness of rape jokes in comedy–and it’s pretty much agreed that the acceptability of the jokes depends on which way you’re punching–like if you’re making the victims of rape the punchline, that’s not cool, whereas making the perpetrators of rape the punchline is punching upward, and OK.)

Prince’s career in my experience is centered around looking for easier and easier targets.

That being said: I do like the work from the series of which the above is a part. Reason being that apparently the photos are images he made himself and then placed the stickers over them. (The appropriation becomes an organic part of the whole instead of the works raison d’etre.)

Conceptually, there’s a lot to unpack. The notion of paywalls–you don’t get to see this unless you pay us, the question: does the disconnect between the work and the intervention of the sticker upon the work enhance or muddle meaning. Also: does censoring something increase merely it’s interest or does it contribute otherwise unfounded creative merit? Questions about whether or not limited resources of consumers limit societal creativity–the notion that this is a photograph infringed upon by a sticker from a DVD from one of the definitive punk bands, i.e. do we consider connections we’re not explicitly told to consider by artists, critical types. It’s also interesting that the photos are all of the type that you would see in mainstream pornography (something which is made with a profit motive) and mementos of consumption–those stickers on CDs serve no purpose other than to facilitate commerce; thus, they serve no purpose. Further, does censoring the graphic parts of the image also make the images less useful as porn, and more appropriate as art.)

They all seem like profound questions, at first. Except they are all really rather staid. It’s kitschy but also clever.

I’m reminded of seeing Junot Diaz speak earlier this year. He was asked about cultural appropriation and made a stunning observation that essentially (this is a rough paraphrase) the line dividing cultural appropriation from cultural appreciation has to do with one’s degree of personal engagement with a particular culture.

It’s like that scene in Dead Poet’s Society where Robin Williams encourages his class to all walk in a slightly different way and one of the students stays leaning up against a wall. When confronted, the student points out that he’s exercising his right not to walk. And Robin Williams thanks him for proving the point of the exercise.

Richard Prince is that kid. Only his entire career has made his actions entirely predictable. At least Censored Art reflects upon the culture with which he is most ostensibly engaged.

Source: romantisme-pornographique

Source unknown – Nacho Vidal & Kristina Rose (2015)

This position is apparently called The Amazon. SWOON.

This gif? As much as I’m always harping about #skinnyframebullshit, I will admit there’s room to argue w/r/t still photographs/images. There’s not when it comes to video–go horizontal or stay your ass home.

Also, I had not seen the scene this is from before deciding to post it. I have subsequently seen enough of the video to know that it’s both too extreme, sexist and seemingly unconcerned with consent to be something I’m ever going to be into. Still, I do think this is gif is sexy af and the segment of the larger clip it’s from is slightly less obnoxious than the rest of the video.

Source: plumeti-and-sex

Source unknown – Title unknown feat. Anina Silk and Joy (2010)

I’m not 100% on the attribution here but I’m pretty sure the year and performers are correct. (If anyone knows where they real clip originates, I’d be interested in seeing it actually.)

Ass play isn’t really my thing. It can absolutely shorten the length of time it takes me to climax and it changes my awareness of what muscles do what when I’m orgasming. Neither of those things really add anything to the experience for me.

If my partner is into it, I’m willing to experiment just so long as my partners mouth as well as my mouth don’t go anywhere near an anus or anything that’s been inserted into an anus. (I know everyone on Tumblr swears about how wonderful analingus is to give and receive, but yeah… no thank you.)

Thus, it’s a little odd that I’m including this in some ways–considering it’s ostensibly a warm up for anal fisting. The reason I like it is two-fold.

First, it reminds me of being five. I had a friend in my neighborhood named Dirk (not his real name but his real name was also disturbingly phallic in hindsight).

Dirk liked to play a game called ‘butt work’. One person would pull down their pants and lay face down on the ground the other person would pull the cheeks of the butt apart and look at, blow on, tickle or insert a finger into the other’s rectum.

I liked the shameless curiosity of it. The experimentation involved.

It was also turn based. I’d lay there hidden from view of the adult world by bushes while someone probed my body. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing but I knew there’d be a chance for me to be equally curious about their body if I was patient.

It’s that sort of I won’t ask you to let me do anything to you that you also wouldn’t ask me to do to you mentality that appeals to me.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Although I would also like to make porn at some point, I’m currently interested in pushing my personal photographic work in a more erotic direction. But I am patently uncomfortable with asking anyone to do something unless there’s some sort of mutuality to it. I have zero interest in pursuing anything exploitative.

I’ve not made much progress on figuring it out. But I did want to point to the mutuality that radiates from this image and to point to that feeling as something I’d like to learn how to encourage and foster in my own work.

Sources unknown – Titles Unknown (20XX)

I have mixed feelings about this photoset.

Part of it hinges on inclusivity. Yes, kudos for representing a panoply of sexual behavior–i.e. group sex (something by which I’ve grown increasingly fascinated) circumcised vs. uncircumcised, shaved vs. unshaved and oral/vaginal/anal.

But the problem becomes more glaring because of the inclusion of the lesbian scene. I’m not opposed to spread-so-wide-the-viewer-can-see-the-urethra shots; but I can’t shake the fact that this is essentially a lipstick lesbian scene–like so much of things pertaining to depiction of lesbian culture–played out in a way which appropriates a portion of the spectrum of female sexuality that notably has fuck all to do with men and stages it as yet another location for male pleasure.

I’ve started to draft a modification based upon this set where I replace the lesbian image with this image–because it would fit aesthetically–but also it just seems more legitimately about documenting pleasure than the appropriation of pleasure as aesthetic.

Then I’d also need to add at least one image to combat the stifling heteronormativity–probably something like this.

However, in doing that you lose something of the charm of the photoset–which is probably the entire reason I ever noticed it in the first place.

Excepting the retro looking sixth image from the top there’s something approaching consistency in image quality. I won’t for a second argue that it looks like all the images were made by one person. (There’s at least a hundred reasons that’s not the case.)

Yet, the images do feature–across the board–one of two things: a sort of surrender to extremity of sensation or a loving attention to detail. For example: the way she’s reaching behind her head to stroke his side in the second image, the way the visible top quarter of his member is covered with the sheen of her juices in the third image, the way it she’s trying to catch every last drop in the fourth image, the bracelet on her right hand in the fifth frame, the way she’s trying to do all the things at once in the sixth image, the visible bubbly spit in the seventh image, her tongue, its piercing and her expression in the eighth image and the way the angle of the light accentuates the texture of her skin in the tenth picture.

And I guess what it boils down to is not only that these are all scenes that I think warrant more expansive consideration but I also feel there exactly the sort of stuff that would provide a solid grounding for an examination of how documenting people fucking in explicit and graphic ways is hardly antithetical to Capital-A Art.

Also–the longer I run this blog–the less out-and-out porn I consume. But when I do consume it, I want it to present sex as anything but rote or by the numbers. I’m interesting in consensual experimentation and extremity.

Barbara Nitke – Bathroom Kiss from Kiss of Fire series (1995)

I have mixed feelings about Nitke.

Besides her stated aim of “find[ing] the humanity in marginal sex,” her work all features a clinically dispassionate eye.

This allows the viewer to bear witness to an awkwardly tender moment such as above. Her presentation of action as jarring, motion blur and off-kilter compositions have become endemic in the work of image makers interested in both fine art and BDSM documentation (I’m thinking here specifically of Aeric Meredith-Goujon and his ilk.)

What irks me is the insistence upon conceptual layering for the pornographic to receive art world credibility. It’s almost like for something to be deemed Capital-A Art, the pornographic has to be somehow mediated and/or commented upon by the work.

Let me give you an example: I’m beginning to consider (with some level of seriousness) pursuing a PhD in Art History. What I am interested in is studying the dichotomy between Art and Porn throughout history and then insofar as it can be reconciled suggest transgressive art as an art historical current seeking to point toward a synthesis between these two allegedly opposite poles.

Invariably when I’m talking to academics–trying to sort potential recommendations, seeking advice w/r/t receptive/non-prudish programs–invariably people ask me why I’m so interested in Jeff Koons or throw Noam Chomsky at me.

I detest Koons. And my favorite incident in Miriam Elia’s indispensible We Go To The Gallery relates to Koons–it’s the perfect take down of his vacuous work but it also serves as a damning critique of why the ‘art world’ tolerated his’ short-lived foray into porn with his Italian porn star partner.

(As far as Chomsky goes, I’m not even going to address it because people far more eloquent than I’ll ever be have already pointed out how it’s bullshit to code switch from critiquing capitalism to a feminist perspective without acknowledging the overarching shift in context. Chomsky’s is allowed to find porn distasteful; he’s not allowed to use his status as a notable (white, cishet male) Academic to attribute unassailable factual status to his own poorly considered concern fapping.)

I guess my point is simply: the subject of Art is inherently relateable to the human experience. Sexuality (or asexuality) is a facet of the human experience. Therefore it is well within the purview of Art to consider it.

I object to the pretense of bending the work into conceptual pretzel shapes to earn a distinct of being meritorious. I want more de Sades, Bellmers and Batailles; fewer Gaspar Noés.

Source: buried-ton-sinking