Categoría: Contemporary art

El Palomar, crossing point

Next event organized by El Palomar is entitled Hedonismo crítico, but this expression also summarizes the artistic position that has governed this project since its inception. Behind this apparent oxymoron or word composed by contradictory terms, is defined a renovated way of understanding cultural production: the party is not incompatible with reflection, conceptual depth with having fun. Mariokissme and R. Marcos Mota, its creators, have always been eloquent in choosing headings. Ever since the inaugural […]

pander & lucas - le bastart

Under the skin

  In Imaginary Magnitude Stanislaw Lem compiled prologues of nonexistent books, written by invented authors, following the way opened by Borges Borges but without his annoying scholarship. One of these prologues was dedicated to Szybisz, an artist who caused a stir with his pornograms, a photographic series of erotic themes made with X-ray equipment. Some critics branded it as sinister romp, as «copulation of jumping skeletons». But these caricatures, reflects on the prolog writer, keep […]

vito acconci - seedbed - le bastart

From tactile cinema to virtual interaction: voyeurs, handsies and exhibitionists

In a letter to Buñuel, Dalí speculate on the feasibility of a cinema that went beyond the retinal. He imagined a conveyor belt in front of the viewer where there would passing tactile substitutes of what was seen on the screen: would pass grafts of hair when is seen the sex of a woman, rubber breasts when the protagonist caresses a girl’s ones… Duchamp dadaist joke with his Prière de toucher (latex breast asking to […]

stark - le bastart

From Aretino to Stark, pornography serving a critical art

Originally, pornography was an artistic genre used by heretics and revolutionaries, political dissidents and freethinkers. During the French Revolution, depravity was equated with corruption in the erotic imagination of poets and artists committed to harassing the Old Regime: to show monarchs being sodomized or fellating the servants, to reveal the impotence of ones and the promiscuity of others, in short, to make public the goings of royal bedchamber, contributed to the collapse of hierarchies and […]

Del Lagrace Volcano Mo B Dick Half & Half 1998

Pansexual revolution

As a gender variant visual artist I access ‘technologies of gender’ in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their ‘ambiguous’ bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at ‘normalisation’. I believe […]

Androgyny and derivatives

The life of Henry Darger was spent between the pages of a book he was writing and illustrating over the years. He called it realms of the unreal and were his only reality, where he found the meaning of his existence in his redemptive role or guardian of the hosts of girls who daily fought against evil forces. When Darger died and his landlords found those intimate epics, one of the questions that incited his […]