Licentiousness, yes, but subject to tight control. Architects, reformers and literati of the eighteenth century coincide in projecting or imagining houses of pleasure inspired by the panopticon of Bentham or anticipating its radial and controlling configuration: the ideal city conceived by Ledoux (in which could not be absent a temple for sex education, the Oikema) is built around that central eye; In The 120 days of Sodom, Sade gives semicircular form to the hall of […]
Historians generally place the beginnings of art in the search of mimesis, the copy of the same, that Pliny the Elder exemplified by the story of a girl drawing the silhouette of her lover on the wall to retain his image. But the cave painting reveals that primitive man and woman barely-represented themselves, and when they did it was in merger with other animals (therians) or in a extremely fragmentary form. So, as Bataille observed, […]
Since the discovery of the technique of wet-drapey in Classical Greece to the arty side of the advertising photo, from Phidias to Erwin Blumenfeld, to veil carnal pleasures has been the best way to enhance them. Now that everything is so overexposed the veil is a precious asset, a relic of more surprising times, such as those that encouraged the encrypted porn, with gray weaving as curtains in front of coupled bodies. These filters, with […]
Il n’y a que du désir et du social, et rien d’autre, L’Anti-Œdipe, 1972, Deleuze; Guattari The soul, prison of the body. With this reversal of the Catholic axiom Foucault supported what had already pointed Nietzsche: slave morality that is born from bad conscience. The subject (subjection, submission) is formed from the repudiation of certain desires. Before them, Hegel: the servants are liberated from the owner, yes, but to finish made conditional on ethical […]
The French verb méduser retains the etymology derived from the Greek myth about the monster whose gaze petrifies, Medusa. Perseus resisted the temptation to face her and brought the shield so that the Gorgon, being reflected in it, would succumbe to fear of contemplating herself. The Gorgonea gaze, médusant look, is fascinating and lethal. Even at the risk of dying, who is magnetized, fascinated, will not want to look away. Fascination is the perception of […]
The gay sauna, in a way, was born in gyms of ancient Greece, male socialization places where young people were trained in both physical exercise and spiritually. Athletics practiced naked (gymnos means nude) by young men with oiled bodies, with chiseled pectorals as Discophoros, admired by mentors (erastés) that would address their military, intellectual and sexual education. Gymnos, baths, palaestra, symposium … were the route gay friendly of the period, with the difference that they […]
Art is one of the professions that encourages greater malleability of identity while allowing get to the bottom of one or yourself more than any other. Such diverse ways in which female artists, from the 60s, have resorted to autobiography and sexual act as an artistic material, indicate the changing overlaps between art, body, intimacy and performativity before and after the arrival of reality show. We will jump from bed to bed to see different […]
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 […]
