I was very proud to see some parents taking their children, maybe 9 to 11 to Marina Abramovic's work at the PICA show.. the most disturbing image i suppose was the frame which showed a woman whose hair was covering her face repeatedly ramming a skull between her breasts, her breath through continuous action produced an odd visual echo of the female sex organs in the structure of her hair. the skull became for me a kind of phallic recapitulation of death's pounding on our emotions, our 'heart'.. but this became other things as well, structures of support, the materiality and unresolvability of representation etc. These are amazing films I thought and worked well.. the sex/death theme is somewhat of a cliche' to the theorist and or average reader of theory, but as I found out with Kara, she had no such circuit and didn't 'get' the skull image, didn't associate the pounding of the skull into the chest with a sexual act etc.. To her my explanation seemed rather oblique and yet it came fully formed to my mind as a kind of gestalt or cathex or mileux or plateau.. I've just ordered a book about Roman perceptions of sexuality.
Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C.-A.D. 250 by John R. Clarke Rather than enjoy erotic images in private, the Romans placed scenes of lovemaking on everyday objects and walls in public spaces. John Clarke discusses the different view of sexuality these objects and their use implies. This is the first work to discuss ancient sexuality emphasizing the evidence to be found in artifacts rather than in the literary record.
Christianity has deformed human sexuality as has everything else, at this point I feel that human sexuality and its contamination into the field of representation is mangled beyond recognition and generally is part of our basic social aporia. like almost everything else, the cards are loaded against great breakthroughs in these fields. The average person and even the non-average person are at great odds to produce anything in this area which isn't somehow tainted with pathology of one sort or another depending on whose percieving a given perception. that being said, there are all kinds of positive and natural nudity and pornography sites, natural breast sites etc.. there are people trying to produce a more wholesome vision of pornography, but the darker drugs are out there, and many of them appeal in one way or another no matter their healthiness in relation to the society at large. There's a lot of good books out there on these subjects. I readCaught Looking: Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship (Limited 1st) by Ellis, Kate Et Al-Editors
many years ago and I think it frames the issues fairly well. I may still have this floating around somewhere. Its not a big book, and the theory is pretty softbut rational.
One of my gages recently is wearing my naughty carnival pins out. people are really intrigued by these sometimes and so shocked at their frankness. It really weird to see their faces when I tell them they are replicas from the 15th century.. As repressed as the middle ages were, there were some valves that we don't have. We have drains. Big industrial culverts, whereas there was still some ludicism left in midieval representations left over from the classical. Its the ludic which is missing, and the in your face, over the top hierarchicalizing of sexual attractiveness which has always been there I suppose, but just seems to like everything else have its own mutation rate. Whatever is 'really' going on with it, we have to consider that the effects in the long run will be biological and will drive cultural mutation in a plethora of ways, positive and negative. Looking at the symbolism of the vagina dentata for example is interesting, as it is a clever program for dedifferentiating sexual dimorphism as an intiation into space and time and landscape.. there are old maps out of these dungeons if one only knows how to read them.. thats what i get anyway.. interesting post alan.----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2006 11:06 AM Subject: sexuality in performance and video
Some notes on sexuality in performance, video, etc. (This is in part afollow-up to a recent discussion elsewhere, and is hopelessly naive, 'off the cuff,' but perhaps of interest anyway.)First, it seems that sexual representation is overdetermined; the result is it tends to dominate everything else. If I have a sexual work in among a number of non-sexual ones, it's the sexual work that's remembered and that actually forms the tenor of subsequent discussion. Our culture is too confused and contradictory in relation to sexuality - it never resolves - and sexual work can open a can of worms. Second, there's a huge responsibility involved, ethically and psychologi- ically, in terms of sexual or even nude representation; if I'm using my own body, I can take that, but if I work with someone else, he or she might not realize the implications. So one has to be careful. Third, using one's own body creates an intense and unresolved disturbance for an audience, when confronted, not only with nudity, but possibly with the nudity of someone present (dressed) in the room - I'm talking about video and reality co-mingling. And this may be difficult to take. All of these situations result in an unresolvable problematic, usually produc- tive of intense and on occasion negative emotions. After all, it's the audience member's own body, own responses (sexual and psychological) that is at stake. Fourth, most members of an audience will resist arousal - and while one can generate any kind of powerful emotions in an audience (and that's generally a good thing), arousal is taboo. Anger can be one result - just like anger against gays often has to do with one's own impulses in that direction. Fifth, we're living in a culture which hinges and intensifies explicit sexual presentation and censoring; nudity is never complete, is always dirty, and always desirable as a result. Television is full of this - which then has to be situated elsewhere and elsewise in a performance. I tend to favor pornography over eroticism (although I don't own any pornography and/or practice it) on the basis of honesty; one is confronted with a kind of truth that eroticism hides. And I think that eroticism spills out into and around capital - it's the 'way' the culture works, even though pornography probably generates more money. To some extent pornography is pornography because it is taboo - a kind of circular reasoning - after all what's being presented is usually fucking of one sort or another, an everyday act. Sixth, pornography is mixed with violence in an equation that I associate with Iraq mixed with Al Qaeda; there's no necessary relation. Television is far more disturbing in terms of the latter than the former, and while some pornography has very uncomfortable power relations embedded in it (for example the 'money shot' of coming on the face of someone, usually a woman), this isn't necessary to it. What does seem necessary is a sense of danger (there's also physiological and psychological evidence for this) or transgression - in this sense, in spite of its codifications, pornography is somewhat revolutionary. (Of course this is also taking the position that pornography may be ultimately liberating, which may well be both naive and retrograde.) Seventh, pornography and eroticism both touch on prostitution, etc.; the very illegality of these forms tends towards a kind of (what is perceived as) low-key criminality. And along with this, pornography now - at this point in time - tends to slide into child pornography - into child abuse - into a general category of 'pervert' - into the idea of sexual danger lurking everywhere for everyone - into increased repression - including things like Megan's law (which seems, to me, fundamentally wrong, a continuous life-long punishment after someone has served time) - I could go on and on about this, but in any case, this discourse of children tends to frame or contaminate or penetrate the discourse of pornography, and sexuality itself. One has to be more careful than ever - that what is adult stays adult for example (however 'adult' or 'mature' for that matter maybe defined). And eighth and final, even now there still seems to be a kind of libera- tion in arousal, sexual display, etc. Dance comes more out of the Dionysian than the Apollonian; it's connected with courtship, with inter- course, mating rituals, Bacchanalias, etc. And yet dance is now largely repressed - it's formalized (the cultivation of protocols, barriers, institutions, companies, etc.) and even though, for example ballet, has heavy sexual elements (supporting someone by the crotch etc.), these are pretty much ignored or bypassed (all the more reason because they domin- ate, are present) in discussion. It's this lack of discussion, lack of sexual discoruse vis-a-vis dance, that, in fact, propels dance, in particular ballet and so-called modern dance. Dancers themselves may be poorly prepared for thinking through these things. (I'm not saying that dancers should dance sexually here - only that this is an option which is generally taboo.) (Of course there are exceptions to everything.) This is somewhat off the top of my head, but it's an area I've had to consider far more than I've wanted to, given the nature of some of my work. From my own viewpoint, my pieces cover a wide field of content and interests, but sexual overdermination creates what might be thought of as a black hole of discourse, everything far too often falling into that particular direction.
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