jum whiting - walking women - le bastart

Erotic machinery, from pistons and cylinders to nanorobots

In the Freudian compendium of oniric symbolisms, the male genitalia are represented as revolvers, knives, swords, sticks … and complex machinic devices. The machine has traditionally been associated with masculinity in its productive and destructive aspect, but the artificial creatures (literary, mythological, filmic) have been mainly women: automatons Galateas, seductive android, Pandoras clad in metal after the Industrial Revolution, replicants with artificial intelligence in the cyber era. But it is not the ideal woman forged […]

krista beinstein - le bastart

Krista Beinstein, woman as fetish of her own desire

Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond categories of sex because the designated subject is not a woman, either economically, politically or ideologically (…) We are escapees from our class as runaway slaves (Monique Wittig, One is not born a woman, 1981) Until the 1970s feminism had been confined to a more or less homogeneous territory of political struggle for gender equality, but in the 1980s there were movements, artists and […]

zhang huan ma liuming - le bastart

Look, if I loved you it was because of you hair

If we consider head hair as a psychic displacement of pubic hair (see Charles Berg’s The Unconscious Meaning of Hair), a broad panoply of sexual references is displayed according to the type of cut, tonsure, length, curl, color … leading to simplistic equations as shaved=celibacy or castration; long and red-haired=hot pussy. The history of art follows these symbolic displacements by immortalizing them in icons, such as the perfidious Lilith combing her red hair (Rossetti’s oil), […]

aida makoto school girls - le bastart

Japanese dolls: toys and idols

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 […]

man ray casati divine decadence by le bastart

Decadence on eternal return

Loving nature is outdated, thought the aristocrat Des Esseintes, who after wasting half of his fortune  in worldly pleasures invested the rest in his artificial paradise away from the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 […]

jan sudek animals at le bastart

Teratological beauty

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 […]

juan escudero categorias - le bastart

Juan Escudero, taxonomic delirium

Let us be Aristotelian: Lola substance, of cheerful quality and fat quantity,  is put in relation (whipped) in submissive position, getting some passion (pain and pleasure), in a set of porn shoot (place). Juan Escudero, in Categories, uses the ten categories that Aristotle left us to define human being and his accidents. He sardonically relates this emphasis in classifying with the taxonomic delirium flooding porn sites. As well as those ten concepts  allowed infinite combinatorics […]

daniel tejero - dibujo - le bastart

Daniel Tejero, metonyms of not regulated desire

Graphite still lifes in which align handcuffs, clamps and bandages between water bottles and towels …, hanging ropes, leather masks … bondage articles solved with meticulous stroke. Daniel Tejero seems to adopt the role of graphic witness of a crime scene, leaving visual proof of each element to the expert report. He was there but the viewer arrived late, so he let him traces to reconstruct his own history. The curiosity of each person reopen […]