It is so respectable to wake up and worry about «what I should wear» as reflecting on whether a sculpture has the proper shape, material and scale. I dare say that sometimes it’s the same exercise. This statement, which I rescued from a lecture given by Ana Laura Aláez in Arteleku, gives us the key to understanding the start of her career as artist and her evolution. For her, self-expression (first in the dressing room) […]
If we consider head hair as a psychic displacement of pubic hair (see Charles Berg’s The Unconscious Meaning of Hair), a broad panoply of sexual references is displayed according to the type of cut, tonsure, length, curl, color … leading to simplistic equations as shaved=celibacy or castration; long and red-haired=hot pussy. The history of art follows these symbolic displacements by immortalizing them in icons, such as the perfidious Lilith combing her red hair (Rossetti’s oil), […]
In the rites of passage the individual is separated from the community and then regrouped assuming a new status. At the threshold between these two phases, human being becomes transitional, remains in suspense, without social reality, and this invisibility allows him to move on the margins of the consensual structure. The «liminal person» is a creative power, liberated from all taboo. Within the ritual it is represented with asexual or bisexual attributes. The anthropologist Victor […]
Since Hannah Arendt regarded love as the essence of the revolutionary spirit, since the counterculture of the sixties claimed it as a subversive force, this original impulse of the human condition has had to abandon the old-fashioned romanticism that reduces it to a flat, narcotizing emotion. The title of the exhibition Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love? in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art is taken from the homonymous action that the artist Sharon […]
A man tells that when he lost his penis a witch came to ask him to return. She told him to climb into the tree and take the one he likes best in the nest where they kept the male organs. And when he wanted to take the biggest she said: you should not take that because it belongs to a parish priest. This extract don’t come from any milesian fable or racy tale but […]
André Lepecki attributed to the figure of street dancer the power to break creatively preset circulation in the preassigned locations, opposing the police choreography the choreopolitics, which spread the movement from one body to another, transmitting affections, favoring the emergence of the subject where it has been ignored. One movement, multiple singular ways to express it. For Raisa Maudit the movement is also a liberating and contagious exercise, radiating anarchic invectives from the body dramaturgy. […]
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 […]
There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer. Humbert Humbert (Nabokov) evokes his sexual awakening and nostalgia for such purity, elusive as the grains of sand that shelters […]
