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 […]
De Quincey discoursed about studying a murder like if it was a painting or a sculpture, ignoring the moral aspects. Our morbid grounds are revealed in such situations, facing the uncomfortable fascination incites us sadism acts. A vast gallery of sadistic women splashes History with sex and blood, mixing chronic and literary lucubration. The real character is enriched with mythical attributes, and the aura that preserves the light of these legendary ladies grows amid darkness […]
Maybe the first artist who broke away from the archetype of virile man was Bas Jan Ader, when in early seventies introduced in a gallery pleas and sentences of melodrama as please do not leave me; when filmed himself crying uncontrollably (I’m too sad to tell you), arranging vases of flowers or delighting in front of a sunset. Although his intention was not to undermine the segregation of roles but to parody the image of […]
In pagan periods myths and legends abound, stories and oral narratives in which coitus between species, far from being stigmatized, exalted the animist communion with nature, virility of gods and heroes, transmuting power of the erotic imagination… With Christianity, the priapic nature spirits become evil beings, the bucolic image of satyr chasing nymphs is replaced in the popular imagination by the goat copulating with witches. Secular societies labeled bestiality among sexual deviations, and then exploited […]
In Imaginary Magnitude Stanislaw Lem compiled prologues of nonexistent books, written by invented authors, following the way opened by Borges Borges but without his annoying scholarship. One of these prologues was dedicated to Szybisz, an artist who caused a stir with his pornograms, a photographic series of erotic themes made with X-ray equipment. Some critics branded it as sinister romp, as «copulation of jumping skeletons». But these caricatures, reflects on the prolog writer, keep […]
The nickname which the popular imagination of the late nineteenth baptized Edison, The Wizard of Menlo Park, realizes the degree of fascination generated by the battery inventions attributed to the engineer. The man who has made captive echo; in these terms introduced Villiers de L’Isle Adam the inventor of the phonograph, making protagonist of one of the most misogynistic plots in the history of science fiction: as a maker of its future Eva moved by […]
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 […]
Originally, pornography was an artistic genre used by heretics and revolutionaries, political dissidents and freethinkers. During the French Revolution, depravity was equated with corruption in the erotic imagination of poets and artists committed to harassing the Old Regime: to show monarchs being sodomized or fellating the servants, to reveal the impotence of ones and the promiscuity of others, in short, to make public the goings of royal bedchamber, contributed to the collapse of hierarchies and […]
