The transition from a gray reality to a fantasy realm, from a windowless room to an infinite and lysergic nature, from cultural oppression to instinctive liberation, is a common denominator of children’s tales like The Wizard of Oz or Winnie the Pooh where the child transforms his o her relatives (or stuffed animals) into extreme beings subject to the whims of sleep. It is not surprising that Henry Darger was fascinated by the tornadoes, thresholds […]
Amour fou involves non-ordinary sexuality the way sorcery demands non-ordinary consciousness (Hakim Bey, TAZ). Who mostly explored the incendiary effects of mad love were the Surrealists, but the paroxysm of passion that embodies this concept does not adhere to a time and place. It vibrates with different chords every chance. Its poetic possibilities has been plumbed as a way of short-circuit of established order by freeing the natural being of any social tie, so often […]
To decryalize the sacred and to sacralize the profane, to order the chaos and disrupt the order, eroticize stigmas and stigmatize precepts, purify the impure, to prefer aporia to logic and the peripheral to the central … It is what we deduce that underlies the intentions of Susana Ibáñez. The artist had already shown in previous works her interest in the wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities (compendiums of knowledge prior to museum asepsis), in which […]
Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum (…) In one beautiful frozen images of Venus, Judith, Susanna, Juno, Lucrece, Salome and other heroines; in the other, living women in their traditional garb, with their stereotyped gestures and phrases. In both, you are in a sense under the sign og archeology; and if I have always loved whorehouses it is because they, too, participate in antiquity by their slave-market aspect, a ritual […]
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 […]
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), […]
Licentiousness, yes, but subject to tight control. Architects, reformers and literati of the eighteenth century coincide in projecting or imagining houses of pleasure inspired by the panopticon of Bentham or anticipating its radial and controlling configuration: the ideal city conceived by Ledoux (in which could not be absent a temple for sex education, the Oikema) is built around that central eye; In The 120 days of Sodom, Sade gives semicircular form to the hall of […]
A man tells that when he lost his penis a witch came to ask him to return. She told him to climb into the tree and take the one he likes best in the nest where they kept the male organs. And when he wanted to take the biggest she said: you should not take that because it belongs to a parish priest. This extract don’t come from any milesian fable or racy tale but […]
