The fossil finds lead us to the redefinition of the human on each occasion, denoting the ambiguity that underlies any search for an evolutionary origin. The paleontologists who found the puzzle of bones that would group under the Beatlemaniac name of Lucy believed to discover the missing link between the primates and the Homo Sapiens. They drived the origin of our species back for several thousand years. How does each anthropological paradigm shift affect our […]
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 […]
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 […]
In an interview, the artist Makoto Aida justifies Japanese obsession with teenagers by what he calls feminization of the country, who lost his father after abolition of the army at the end of World War II. Aida’s work caricatures sexual philias of his countrymen, attacks the vernacular masochism rooted in ancient codes of honor, entrepreneurial fever and dreamy ways to escape. Since the floating time of ukiyo-e to the weightless walks between manga girls of […]
He constructed his own model of vision with cameras that manufactured himself. Taking refuge in a cabin stocked with a few books of optics, philosophy and art, a particular world was built not by the naivete of believing to fulfill his dreams but by the freedom to keep dreaming. After studying fine arts in Prague during the early years of the Communist regime, Miroslav Tichý opted for an outsider life in his hometown, Kyjov life. […]
To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word «nude,» on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed. (Kenneth Clark, Naked, nude and ideal form) From our […]
Loving nature is outdated, thought the aristocrat Des Esseintes, who after wasting half of his fortune in worldly pleasures invested the rest in his artificial paradise away from the Parisian triviality. Mechanical fishes, monstrous hothouse flowers, a turtle with precious stones in the golden shell, a design to match the carpet. With this character, Joris-Karl Huysmans marked the zenith and the decline of decadence. The title of the novel, À rebours, summarizes his intention to […]
I am for a while the melancholy of a fragmented figure, and in that interval the mystery is revealed, Pierre Molinier The beauty of the monster began to be claimed by the romantic sensibility, when appeared aesthetic categories attending to emotional states rather than object qualities. Thus, the sublime and the grotesque will take the artistic experience to metaphysical grounds. In both concepts exist a conflict of internal forces between attraction and rejection, ecstasy and […]
