Perhaps it is due to a lack of historical perspective, but it seems that feminism, whose stages used to be defined in waves, does not know where to surf, where it is headed. Sucked into the neoliberal maelstrom, the girl power is advertised on the catwalks of Christian Dior, and young women dive like redeemed narcissus into a digital fluidity. The media sells us that the crux of the matter is to debate whether the […]
Volumes have been writing on English eccentricity, films and television series have even been made. Volumes could also be compiled on British humor and its satirical tone applied to its own idiosyncrasy. Both aspects, self-criticism and extravagance, are ruling traits of Grayson Perry‘s personality. Ceramist and transvestite, he has achieved ceramics to be considered a “fine art” and has made transvestism an essential part of his expressive necessity. Going around the halls of a museum displaying glazed vases […]
The fragile boundary between art and pornography has always worried scholars, museographers and guarantors of morality, which from the mid-nineteenth century, when the category “obscenity” assumed a legal status in England, gave rise to countless proceedings, committees and reviews of the illicit. In the midst of the sexual liberation, what happened inside the courts seemed insulated in a bubble, alien to the radical changes that were affecting even the meaning of art. In the Longford […]
Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (Roman tomb epitaph, Epicurean principle: I did not exist, I existed, I do not exist, I do not care). Epicureanism revealed the nonsense of all fears with […]
The reverse of consensual reality never before Joel-Peter Witkin had been shown with such diabolical perfection and such crossing of artistic genres. It was in the late Middle Ages when iconographies with cynical streak were developed to erode the status quo, being the mundus inversus (the donkeys riding the men, the rich serving the poor …) and the “macabre dance” those who mostly devastated social hierarchies and taboos. Bearing in mind that in medieval times the […]
Alors vous lui réapprendrez à danser à l’envers comme dans le délire des bals musette et cet envers sera son véritable endroit, Antonin Artaud It was back in the 1930’s when Antonin Artaud was in and out of asylums; in the same decade, Carol Rama went daily to visit her mother admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The encounter with sick bodies and confinement conditions inspired her first watercolors. In 1945, Rama celebrates her first exhibition […]
Je pense que le couple nègre/blanche est pire qu’une bombe, writes Dany Laferrière (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 1985). Sexuality is, more than anything, a matter of ghosts, and the ghost that join a black man and a white woman is one of the most explosive that there is. Sexual imaginaries in relation to ethnic otherness continue to bear the burden of colonial legacy. The topics are renewed, adapting to the changing demands […]
Photography is always a capture of an announced death. There is no future in it, said Roland Barthes. What you show will no longer return, if it has ever been. No wonder it is an artistic expression of those who are seduced by death most. Both the self-portraits that Pierre Molinier staged in the last years of his life locked in his apartment, like the photographs that Antoine d’Agata has been making from himself and […]
