pander & lucas - le bastart

Under the skin

  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 […]

Love and electromagnetism

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 […]

vito acconci - seedbed - le bastart

From tactile cinema to virtual interaction: voyeurs, handsies and exhibitionists

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 […]

stark - le bastart

From Aretino to Stark, pornography serving a critical art

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 […]

Desire as psychological breakdown

Eroticism bring into question the person as individual being closed in himself. Lovers dissolve each other into one body, hence the daily expression of dissolute life. The organs spill into the branch of the merger, wrote Georges Bataille, whose way of describing the erotic act as that part of sexuality that moves our inner found its translation in Hans Bellmer drawings. Although the emphasis that the French writer put on the religious component of eroticism […]