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 […]
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 […]
Loving nature is outdated, thought the aristocrat Des Esseintes, who after wasting half of his fortune in worldly pleasures invested the rest in his artificial paradise away from the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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In De humani corporis fabrica, Andrea Vesalius dedicated seven volumes to defend the practice of dissection to a society even rooted in the medieval conception of the body as a divine creation. To penetrate the secrets of the flesh, including for medical purposes, was in some way sacrilegious. The engravings of this treatise on anatomy reveal the difficulty of this change of mind: the flayed are not pure helpless residue; They suffer and think of […]
