“The body is a repository of marks”, we are told at one point in one of Carlos Motta‘s visual essays, Lágrimas (2017). Many of the works of this Colombian artist speak about colonial and postcolonial marks, metaphorical scars on flesh and desire, indelible despite the passing of centuries. Jacques Derrida, for whom the concept of cultural “sign” or “scar” was so important, said that it is not possible to escape the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even the death […]
Pasolini recalled from his student days an occasion when he was contemplating with friends a fireflies’ dance a night without moonlight. That experience was recorded in his conscience as a premonition of a nearby decline. Two decades later, he would confirm the “disappearance of the fireflies” in an Italy drowned in the fascism of the media, that in his opinion was more terrifying than the one established by Mussolini. Speaking metaphorically, the fireflies were for Pasolini bodies […]
Il n’y a que du désir et du social, et rien d’autre, L’Anti-Œdipe, 1972, Deleuze; Guattari The soul, prison of the body. With this reversal of the Catholic axiom Foucault supported what had already pointed Nietzsche: slave morality that is born from bad conscience. The subject (subjection, submission) is formed from the repudiation of certain desires. Before them, Hegel: the servants are liberated from the owner, yes, but to finish made conditional on ethical […]
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 […]
In condemning the eroticism, Christianity propitiated that the lubricious imagination concentrate in hell, making it the sky of the sinners, the paradise of lust. Artists of all the times have been filling the underworld by all kinds of paraphilias, apparently to damn them but in practice to satisfy the scoptophilic appetite of their patrons or clients. But the confessed anticlericalism is not embodied in art (literature first) until the eighteenth century, when dissident artists release […]
