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 […]
Loving nature is outdated, thought the aristocrat Des Esseintes, who after wasting half of his fortune in worldly pleasures invested the rest in his artificial paradise away from the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 […]
Pre-Columbian codices report cosmogonies full of cruelty and eroticism, magic and transformations. Early interpretations, completely biased, of these pictograms came to us from the hosts of Hispanic conquerors, scandalized by polisexual divinity and phallic worship. In Mayan and Huasteca cultures, goddesses related to sexuality as Ixchel and Tlazolteotl were hermaphrodites. The second one incited to lust and drunkenness but was the assistant of women giving birth, healing, earth and moon deity. It was often represented […]
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 […]
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 […]
First act: a patient lying on a bed hospital, immobilized between prosthesis and blankets, he is attended (better to say disregarded) by nurses with carmine lips and tight clothes, unaware of the invalid progressive hard-on (ereccion). This scene sums up the germ of Stu Mead‘s teeming imagination, who spent part of his childhood bedridden due to an illness which will hindered his adult relationship with women. Sincere in both words and pictures, he doesn’t hides […]
