“Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream, has not worn it – infants, angels, priests, the dead; why should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?” – Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunkey; by the poor, like a thief.” – Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night

 

Contemplation Before Surgery, Joe Wilder, MD. 1998.

A graduate of Columbia Medical School and professor of surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Wilder composed “Surgeons at Work,” a series of 14 paintings on the subject of his profession.

“A surgeon, like an ancient priest, operates on a helpless, unconscious patient, and must never lose sight of this God-given responsibility.”

“Almost every day I experienced great joy, as with a few words I could turn a frightened patient or relative into a more peaceful individual and make him or her the most important person in my life.”

 

Photograph of a hospital operating room. Netherlands, 1940.

 

Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken, Josse Lieferinxe, 1497-99. Sebastian, depicted pierced with arrows as dictated by tradition, prays before God in the clouds as a victim of the Black Plague is buried. At the same time an attendant to the grave is himself struck with disease.

Scholar Melissa Katz argues that visual depictions of pain may have played a palliative role in early modern society. Through “an emphasis on the physical torments to be endured prior to the achievement of beatific transcendence,” art invited worshippers to contemplate the reward awaiting them in heaven. This piece was commissioned by a church as part of an altar.

 

YERSINIA PESTIS, electron micrograph. Microbe responsible for the Black Plague, seen inside the gut of a flea.

 

Rheumatic pain II (Dolor reumatico II), Remedios Varo, 1948. The surrealist painter depicts the symptoms of fibromyalgia, a chronic neurosensory disorder characterized by musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, and sleep difficulties, whose pathophysiology is not fully understood.

 

Fever, Jacek Yerka, 1982.

 

Kylie Minogue – Fever (Live in 2001)

 

Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, Wangechi Mutu, 2004-2005. Mutu attributes her artistic interest in medical subjects to her mother’s career as a nurse. These pieces incorporate 19th century gynecological drawings in collage.

“[Mutu] uses material from a diverse range of sources including fashion and pornographic magazines, as well as ethnographic or scientific publications, such as National Geographic. She explains: ‘I go to these magazines for material and doing that allows me to critique them by breaking them apart and kind of vandalising and dissecting them. I pull apart their structure, literally and physically and conceptually, and then reinterpret it for my own purposes and my own interests.’”

 

Preserved remnants of a 13th century autopsy…

 

And a CT scan of the same:

 

A Student’s Dream, 1906. A medical student poses with cadavers in a humorous reversal of roles.

 

The Gout, James Gillray, 1799. Gout, a painful inflammatory condition caused by excessive buildup of uric acid in the joints, often presents first below the big toe.

 

Crystals seen in the synovial fluid of a patient with gout.

 

Horsford’s acid phosphate, a tart combination of phosphoric acid with various phosphate salts, was sold in the mid 19th century as a general health tonic, and later made its way into an early recipe for Coca-Cola as a substitute for natural citric acid from fruits. You can still purchase some today, for use in sodas and cocktails: Horsford Acid Phosphate – Art of Drink.

 

This illustration purports to depict the first administration of oxygen gas to a patient with pneumonia, performed by Dr. George Holtzapple in 1885. A 2005 publication disputes this claim, indicating that Dr. Holtzapple “was not the first to use oxygen for pneumonia patients, but was the first to publish a case report with a reasoned physiological explanation of oxygen therapy.”

 

Ad for an exhibit by artist Trevor Brown. 1996.

 

Panel 56 of the Migration Series, Jacob Lawrence, 1941. At just 23 years old, Lawrence painted 60 panels illustrating the lives of Black Americans who moved from the South to the North during the Great Migration. This panel’s original caption: “Among one of the last groups to leave the South was the Negro professional who was forced to follow his clientele to make a living.” Here, that professional is a doctor.

 

Tomb relief at Saqqara, 2350-2000 BCE, depicting what may be mankind’s oldest surgical procedure: male circumcision. Though endorsed by major health organizations for the prevention of conditions like HIV and penile cancer, the practice is not without its controversy, especially in the developed world.

 

Restraining device used for infants during circumcision. Photo by James Loewen.

 

Poet and pediatrician William Carlos Williams as a young resident at the New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital.

“The young doctor is dancing with happiness
in the sparkling wind, alone
at the prow of the ferry! He notices
the curdy barnacles and broken ice crusts
left at the slip’s base by the low tide
and thinks of summer and green
shell-crusted ledges among
————————-the emerald eel-grass!”

– William Carlos Williams, stanza from January Morning

 

Stills from Eyes Without a Face, dir. Georges Franju, 1960.

 

General Surgery – Crimson Concerto (Live in 2018)

 

Some drawings by Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty, ca. 1745. The artist collaborated with physician Guichard Joseph Duverney to create detailed anatomical illustrations in vibrant color.

 

H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West, Re-Animator, a medical student who experiments with the resurrection of cadavers, is here substituted with Kanye West in a reimagination by Joshua Chaplinsky.

 

Wade and Nelson, Radiological evaluation of the evisceration tradition in ancient Egyptian mummies, 2013. These CT scans were performed on the mummy Djedmaatesankh, an ordinary woman from Thebes who died almost 3000 years ago. The body was eviscerated and filled with packages which possibly contained organs. A scarab and falcon were placed on the abdomen external to the body cavity.

 

Snowboarder, Nick Veasey, 2018. Nick Veasey’s artwork uses a combination of real X-ray technology with digital photomanipulation to produce dynamic images of the motion underneath.

 

Dr. Octagon – Blue Flowers (1996)

 

A 17th century illustration by Pietro Berettini depicting the circulatory system. In the lower left corner is a man receiving a blood transfusion from a sheep, and on the right a woman opens her chest to reveal her heart.

Despite a few cases of successful xenotransfusion (transfusion between species), the practice was banned by both France and England in the year 1670, following several patient deaths.

 

A “zodiac man” diagram from the year 1475. These were used as references for physicians in the practice of bloodletting, to avoid draining blood from certain regions of the body during periods of influence from their corresponding stars.

 

Spring lancet, ca. 1870, an instrument used for bloodletting.

“The spring lancet had a blade attached to a wire coil. Upon release of the spring, the blade penetrated the patient’s body. Thus, a physician did not have to apply manual pressure. He could also control the depth of the incision by changing the pressure on the spring. Lancets were used in venesection to remove large amounts of blood.

The scarificator [not pictured] was a multi-blade instrument used for making several cuts at the same time, thus rendering repeated incisions with a lancet unnecessary. However, since it only cut through capillaries, it required cupping to increase blood flow. In wet cupping, the heated cup was applied to the slightly slit skin. The vacuum effect helped to remove the blood.”

 

Depictions of a young anorexic patient before and after treatment. From an 1888 issue of The Lancet, a major medical journal still in publication today.

Recent neurobiological research on anorexia nervosa suggests the disorder may be related to abnormalities of learning and reward processing. Restriction of food intake may provide temporary relief from depression or anxiety through modulation of serotonin-mediated pathways, thereby reinforcing the self-starving behavior.

 

Anti-smoking PSA created in 1977 by the Pharmacists Planning Service.

“Whenever possible, the tobacco industry works to prevent the creation of media campaigns. In Minnesota, the tobacco industry used political connections to monitor the development of the state’s media campaign, seeing the 1984 Minnesota Plan for Nonsmoking and Health as ‘a revolutionary attack on our industry.’ These connections included informal contacts with members of the technical advisory committee responsible for the implementation of the plan.

The tobacco industry hoped that by monitoring the development of the Minnesota plan, they would be able to reverse any progress that could occur. After monitoring the program, the tobacco industry realized that there was enough support for the Minnesota plan that they needed to take additional steps. Therefore, they created their own, competing campaign and then argued that the state campaign was a waste of taxpayer funds.

The tobacco industry also attempted to prevent the creation of California’s tobacco control media campaign in 1989 while the California legislature was creating the implementing legislation for Proposition 99. According to the political editor of the California Journal in 1989, the media campaign ‘was the main issue because it was that component that bothered them [the tobacco industry] the most. I mean the tax was the tax, there was nothing they could do about it, but the notion that Californians would be educated and that there would be a specific media component to it was what terrified them.’”

 

Seattle, 1995, HIV education card.

“On the front of the card is an abstract painting of two figures in colorful costumes wearing masks. On the back, at the top, against red background, is fiction about AIDS: ‘AIDS is a disease for older guys.’ At the bottom, against yellow background, is fact: ‘Most people who get HIV get it when they’re young. They can stay healthy for 10 years or more before developing AIDs [sic].’ Phone number to call for help is provided.”

 

August 13, 1937: a crowd in Chicago rallies against syphilis.

“Most cities across America didn’t jump on the war-against-syphilis bandwagon. But Chicago did, more so than any other community. Its leading newspaper, the Tribune, made the crusade a top priority. A paper known for its rigid conservatism took up the mission of challenging prudery.

The Tribune’s pages shattered ‘the conspiracy of silence’ about venereal diseases. A term like ‘social hygiene,’ it editorialized, was ‘a euphemism which means little.’ In the first two months of 1937, the Tribune published over 50 pieces on venereal diseases. ‘Syphilis’ appeared regularly in its headlines, including on the front page.

Mayor Edward Kelly launched the war with a major conference in January. He assembled a large blue-ribbon commission for a citywide assault on ‘these enemies of mankind.’ Aware of Chicago’s reputation for corruption, the president of the city’s board of health told the press that ‘there is no politics in syphilis and gonorrhea. The city administration has nothing political to sell in undertaking this campaign.’ Another public health official sounded a similar note. ‘There are no political, religious, racial, national, or other groups to be favored … The enemy we are going to fight plays no favorites.’”

“At the end of 1936, Chicago had just two public clinics that provided [venereal disease] testing. One was at police headquarters and the other at the city jail, neither location particularly inviting. A year later, the city had 35 new locations. It also offered on-site testing at factories and high schools.”

 

Scene from The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Fritz Lang, 1933

 

BONUS:

Image hanging on the wall at my medical school.

“The end of physic is our body’s health.
Why, Faustus, hast thou not attain’d that end?
Is not thy common talk found aphorisms?
Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,
Whereby whole cities have escap’d the plague,
And thousand desperate maladies been eas’d?
Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man.
Couldst thou make men to live eternally,
Or, being dead, raise them to life again,
Then this profession were to be esteem’d.”

—————————-– Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus

 

SOURCES:

AMBOSS med school study tool

National Library of Medicine image collections

https://joewilderarts.com/about-the-artist-joe-wilder/#bg

https://www.persee.fr/doc/inter_1164-6225_2006_num_26_1_1311

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/wangechi-mutu-histology-different-classes-uterine-tumors

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4042035/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16244712/

Neurobiology of anorexia and bulimia nervosa – PubMed

https://onlineexhibits.library.yale.edu/s/medicalastrology/page/astrological-anatomy

1937: Chicago goes to war – Windy City Times

The Rise and Fall of Tobacco Control Media Campaigns, 1967–2006 – PMC

https://info.hsls.pitt.edu/updatereport/2020/september-2020/treasures-from-the-rare-book-room-the-super-brief-history-of-bloodletting/

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Today we get the immense pleasure of concentrating on a truly beautiful, poetic and even informative post from Dev. I’m blown away by it, and I hope you get a lot from it too. Cool if you could give him some feedback although, of course, no rules around here. Enjoy the gift, and so many thanks to you, Dev. ** Laura, Hi. I don’t really know what Russia-based porn is like these days. They used to own the darker side of twink porn … what 20 years ago. As you know. The Michon book isn’t in English, is it? I can’t read French. Well, the ‘newspaper’ and subtitles a little. Sure, my work has gotten wonderful press. More so than bad, at this point, I think. Nice poem. Your dad’s. Footnotes, yeah, no clue. Never used them. DF Wallace did brilliant things with them, I think. Today? Just a bunch of film screening searching and setting up, I think. I think there might be a reading I want to go to tonight, but I have to check. You, yours? ** _Black_Acrylic, Motherfuckers! And so boringly predictable. ** Lucas, Hi. Yeah, Kalil Haddad is very interesting. Hard to see his work though. I tried to make a post about him, but there’s almost no presence for his actual films online to swipe. I always have to pack everything for a trip, except, like, toiletries, at least 24 hours before I leave because I get pre-trip anxiety. So, no, I’m a ‘be prepared’ kind of dude. Yeah, it seems like your comfort and confidence with prose is at a height. If you ever take some iPhone snaps of your friend’s analog collages, I’d be curious to take them in. ** Nicholas., Yay, HNY then! I do think growing up in LA contributed heavily to my kind of calm demeanor even though inside I can be stressing way out. But, no, I’m not mean or duplicitous or anything. ‘Room Temperature’s’ original producer was a hateful monster, and I did blow up at him a number of times, and it wasn’t pretty, but he deserved it. No, I didn’t think to make 2026 resolutions or anything. Too late now, I think. Yours are good on both fronts, obviously. ** Carsten, Congrats on the acceptance! Happy you seem to have found your journal/publisher family. Grungy LA is not hard to find, and downtown still has its pockets for sure, and further out, as always. Nice, thank you re: the guest post. Whenever’s good. ** Brendan, Definitely: Tarr. Yeah, just last night I saw an ad thing for the NYC show you’re in. Very cool! Enjoy your show’s last days however one can do that. Those guys who run that gallery seemed really nice. And it has a bathroom. And the bathroom is very William Eggleston. Congrats on your bicoastiality. That’s not a word? ** Steve, No mice here yet, but I’m counting the days. I’ve certainly seen a bunch of AI porn, but nothing that gets into the art realm. Or into my art realm. AI’s inherent vapidity might be a problem. The guitarist is Shane Parish, and this is the album. Sparks ’74, ‘Propaganda’ era, nice. ** kenley, Thank you for the warm return. Amazing that The Last Bookstore is still around. It’s intermittently great, but just the parking around there is hellish. I’m a little behind on current LA due to only occasionally visiting. Stories is a pretty good bookstore. There’s this newish, very quirky Russian museum in Culver City called Wende is pretty interesting. Let me have a think. I can see the solidarity thing. I can see that there’s an openness to her mystery that can make one want to own it in some weird way. Yes, Haddad’s a Torontoian. You probably have the best shot and seeing his stuff. It’s hard. Okay, thank you about Hearn. That’s enough info to get me angled. How are you doing otherwise? What are you up to? ** Bill, Can’t remember where exactly I found the Hensher review. It’s hard to find writing about Tillman that doesn’t have the kind of qualifying and questioning I think his work is due. Jury duty, yikes. I’ve never ever responded to any of the summons for jury duty I’ve ever received, and no one has ever come after me. Anyway, I assume I would just have to say I’m anarchist to get immediately dismissed. ** Dev, Hi, maestro. Thank you again ‘in person’ for the amazing post. I’m very chuffed, as I guess t the Brits say. Your birthday’s on Sunday? Are you doing anything of marked interest? I’m broke, and everyone I know is broke, so I suspect I’ll be lucky to have a meal with a friend or three. I have an odd idea of seeing if friends want to get together and eat a GdR and watch Tati’s ‘Playtime’ for some reason, but that might be too much to organise too late in the day. ** HaRpEr //, London might be #2 sex crimes central after LA, I wonder. Curious place, the UK. Like when I’m gather slaves for the posts, I would say 80% of the slaves, and the kinkiest ones, are based in the UK. Germany is #2. Paris doesn’t have much negative space either. It’s highly organised. Which I like, mind you. In the 70s there were quite a few gay porn filmmakers who tried to make gay porn was also actual art, high art even. But they were just artsy-fartsy porn films in the end. Cadinot got close to making pretty artful, smart but sexy porn in his early days. I haven’t seen ‘Castration Movie’ yet, but some say it’s something of the sort? ** Steeqhen, Cool about Gluck’s reading. I’m sure you acquitted yourself perfectly well. Luck with that bookshop. How long are you in London for? ** Uday, You? I think I would feel the need to master my technique before I texted anyone worthy and of note. I’ve been interested in subverting and complicating, etc. sexiness in my work for a long time. It’s an interesting quest. It’s a challenging power to work with. I think there are artists who have been pretty successful at it. Here and there. I’m not coffeed up enough to name names at the moment, but I could. ** Okay. Glorify yourselves and whatever else you want and feel in the face of Dev’s masterful construction until I see you again tomorrow. Thank you.

 

Robert Heinecken
William E. Jones
Erin M. Riley
Elin Magnusson
Paul Yore
Ellen Cantor
Marilyn Minter
Wolfgang Tillmans
Jim Herbert
Mike Bouchet
Anna Uddenberg
Andrea Fraser
Thomas Ruff
Zoe Williams
Aura Rosenberg
Bjørn Nørgaard & Lene Adler Petersen
Joan Semmel
Showa Hanako 2
Elizabeth Jaeger
Dom Barra
Vika Kirchenbauer
Carolee Thea
Kalil Haddad
Dash Snow

 

____________
Robert Heinecken Time (1st Group) (1969)
‘Heinecken explored this tension in his altered magazines—a sprawling group of works he produced between 1969 and 1974. In Mansmag, 1969, he employed lithography again, to print photograms of soft-core porn on top of one another in vivid color. Text, cartoons, and “real” bodies interact, their almost flickering forms approaching one another from various angles. Quickly, however, Heinecken turned to collaging magazine pages themselves. Time (First Group), 1969, for example, consisted of pages cut from the famous newsmagazine, overlaid with lithographs of cheesecake shots and reassembled in an aleatory order. Then, in Periodical #1, 1969, he simply cut up and reconfigured a group of twenty-nine magazines ranging from Glamour and Good Housekeeping to Playboy and Guns and Ammo, without adding overlays. The end product was a set of nineteen twenty-nine-page volumes, or “variants” (the artist’s preferred term), each containing a single leaf from each magazine. When we flip through these reconstituted magazines, we experience a cacophony: not only forms of advertising address geared toward different education levels and tastes but a mélange of subjects and voices, some first-person confessionals, some omniscient and ostensibly ungendered news stories.’ — Matthew Biro, Artforum

 

______________
William E. Jones The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998)
‘Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.’ — trakt

Excerpt

 

______________
Erin M Riley Year of Porn (2016)
‘Erin M Riley’s woven artworks take screenshots of online pornography captured at the moment of climax and turns them into wonderfully intricate, contemporary tapestries. Year of Porn first started as a way for Erin to pass the time: “I would watch porn on my phone regularly to fall asleep. Often the next day I’d go to look for something online and the browser was still up. My inclination was always to hide it, feeling shame or embarrassment despite most people relating or not being phased if they did see,” explains Erin. “ I started screenshotting the moment of climax when I watched porn on my phone and just filing it away on my camera roll.”’ — It’s Nice That

 

______________
Elin Magnusson Skin (2009)
‘In a room on the seventh floor in a cold city, two people are waking up. They hug each other hard, still, it’s not enough to be able to forget where one body starts and the other ends. Neither of them has a sex or a face and they both wear more layers of skin than they ought to. Old disappointments and badly healed wounds have turned them into this. With a pair of scissors they ask each other for permission to expose, rip up and get in. Something forgotten turns into a memory that later transforms into fingers, and finally a hand. Hair begins to smell and the sweat is pouring. In close-ups about closeness we see the longing for something new. Art meets porn in a ripping horniness without censorship.’ — letterboxd

Watch an excerpt here

 

______________
Paul Yore Everything Is F…ed (2014)
‘Two prominent Melbourne art experts have told a court artwork that featured photographs of children’s faces superimposed on images of male bodies performing sex acts had artistic merit and doesn’t constitute pornography. Police removed seven images of children’s faces from Paul Yore’s large-scale artwork, Everything Is F…ed, at a St Kilda gallery last year after a member of the public made a complaint, Melbourne Magistrates Court heard on Monday. Mr Yore, 26, was later charged with one count each of producing and possessing child pornography, related to his work, which was installed at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts in May last year. Mr Yore is pleading not guilty to both charges. Mr Yore’s work, which featured in a tribute exhibition to the late Australian artist Mike Brown, also featured an image of pop star Justin Bieber’s head on a sex toy.’ — The Age

 

______________
Marilyn Minter Green Pink Caviar (2009)
‘Green Pink Caviar marks photographer Marilyn Minter’s first foray into video production. The artist is well-known for commingling glamour and grit in images that dissolve the boundary between fine and commercial art. Green Pink Caviar is no exception. Like her previous work, the video illustrates the moment where clarity becomes abstraction and beauty commingles with the grotesque. According to her New York gallery, Salon 94, “In Minter’s world, the body is cast as a site of aggressive desire.” Tongues covered in glittering candy attempt to push beyond the picture plane and enter the viewer’s space.’ — Cranbrook Art Museum

 

______________
Wolfgang Tillmans Various (1994 – 1999)
‘Wolfgang Tillmans is a very fashionable photographer. His photographs of city life, of random street moments and drop-outs posing in squats have won him huge acclaim. They are very individual and accomplished, bedraggled but oddly cheerful. Anyone wanting to see his works can head off down to Tate Britain in London, where he has been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize. His room consists of a few dozen photographs, casually fastened to the wall, of things in the street which caught his eye. He is a very good photographer, and it was something of a surprise to learn that he thinks it worth his while to contribute to the seedy pages of an American gay porn mag. Certainly, these photographs don’t look like art to me; they look like pornography, with their efficient and slightly alarming concentration on body parts. Whether there is anything wrong with a high-art photographer occasionally dropping his Turner-prize persona and going out to work in the lowest of genres is, however, an interesting question.’ — Philip Hensher

 

______________
Ellen Cantor Pinochet Porn (2011)
‘”Pinochet Porn” is a soap opera-like narrative about five children growing up during the Pinochet regime, and their subsequent maturation into adulthood. Shot on Super-8, this feature-length film is based on a 2005 hand drawn film script “Circus Lives from Hell”. The story while disclosing the intertwined lives of these five characters, also reveals its nature as a microcosm of surrounding political discord, cycles of destruction, and mounting violence. It is at once tragic and comedic. Segments of a particular history are made observable through the circumstances of the lives depicted, all obliquely revolving around the Pinochet regime in Chile. Within this story, childhood fantasy is permeated by structures of annihilation, which the characters later create in their own lives as adults.’ — EC

 

______________
Jim Herbert Untitled Paintings (2010)
‘English Kills’s new exhibition features fourteen dazzling, floor-to-ceiling paintings based on images of porn that artist Jim Herbert culled from the internet. Herbert, who studied with Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still, says it’s mix and match with a lot of changes and edits, a figure from this added to that. “A lot is made up in process,” he reports. Thickly painted in acrylics applied directly with his fingers, Herbert’s orgasmic, painterly brio recalls Chaim Soutine and Georg Baselitz. Looking at the paintings, which feature teenagers having sex in quotidian domestic settings or en plein air, the viewer is compelled to ask whether the process, which breaks down the barrier between seeing and touching, is an erotic experience for the seventy-something artist. “No, because the narrow utility of porn’s attraction gives way to the whirling dervish of making – an entirely different kind of focus and excitement,” Herbert says. “Art making can be a sensual, playful experience – but with the possibility of a wreck on every turn. Both hands on the wheel please.”’ — Two Coats of Paint

 

______________
Mike Bouchet Untitled Video (2011)
‘The original artwork is a four channel projection with a running time of 10 minutes. The video was created by compositing 10,000 separate adult videos into a mosiac. Each individual video runs for 10 minutes. The original artwork can be projected up to 60ft in diameter.’ — MB

Excerpt

 

______________
Anna Uddenberg Pelvic Trust (2017)
‘Anna’s sculptures are gendered and highly sexualized but to me, more than problematizing the figure of women, they are destabilizing femininity. It is easy to read the bodies’ physique, as those of a hyper-femme, but it is rather the signifiers that let the viewer know that it is femininity what is being challenged. The signifiers of femininity are clear: the long acrylic nails, the long hair, the pink tones, and the hyper sexualization of certain body parts. But the materialization of sex is left to the spectator, like this we could assume the sculptures are those of hyper sexualized women but I like to think it is femininity what is being questioned.’ — Susana Vargas Cervantes

 

______________
Andrea Fraser Untitled (2002)
‘Performance artist Andrea Fraser has long been acclaimed as provocateur, leading a unique style of performance art coined as “institutional critique.” Perhaps her most controversial work to date is “Untitled” (2002) a videotape performance where Fraser had a 60 minute sexual encounter with a prominent art collector through a contractual agreement. The artist proposed the piece to the Friedrich Petzel Gallery and asked them to facilitate an agreement between the artist and the patron in which the patron participated in the production of contemporary art through a sexual act in a hotel room. In the end, the patron paid $20,000 for the work in the form of an unedited videotape of the performance, and one other copy went on view at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery.’ — Daily Serving

 

_________________
Zoe Williams Fleece Taste (2015)
‘The politics of sex are central to the films of Zoe Williams. Her works touch on ideas of seduction, sensuality and transgression. Fleece Taste expands on her interest in the symbolism of classical iconography as much as ideas around fashion, tactile or reflective materials, advertising, luxury objects and the female body.’ — Kaleidoscope

 

_______________
Aura Rosenberg The Dialectical Porn Rock (1989 – 2012)
‘Mike Ballou was making these sculptures out of porn images, and he’s also a trout fisherman. I thought, “I’ll make a real fetish! Instead of trying to run away from it, I’ll totally embrace it.” I stole some of his magazines, pasted the pictures on these rocks, covered them in resin, and put them in this trout stream. I did that, but then I looked at them and thought that there was really some food for thought there. I tried photographing them then, which were the first photographs I ever shot. I was really amazed at the way these rocks looked through the lens of a camera. It wasn’t until a while later that I started thinking about them as things in themselves, as something that I could install indoors or outdoors as a sculpture.’ — AR

 

______________
Thomas Ruff Nudes (2011 -> )
‘Taken from porn sites, Thomas Ruff’s ongoing series Nudes thwarts the urge to see more and more – and by so doing brings us back to our senses. I mean that literally – to the blurry imprecision of the senses. Several contradictory things go on depending on which photographs you are looking at (or even while looking at the same picture). Porn takes the universal desire to have sex and delivers it and improves on it: perfect bodies, no disease or impotence (as suffered by the porn-addicted Michael Fassbender in Steve McQueen’s film Shame), no heartbreak, no regrets, no consequences. But by blurring these images Ruff improves them in the opposite direction. They acquire the uncertainty of memory, the imprecision of unenacted fantasy, the unfocusable swirl of the unconscious, of dreams. Or nightmares in which the idyll becomes either leeringly horrible or ludicrous and laughable. Though they are arranged with only one thing in mind, the original lighting is coaxed into gorgeous subtleties; colours become nuanced, delicate, or expressionistically garish. Acts and actors become more intimate than – and more remote from – the way they appeared on screen. The photographs impart a lyricism to the source material; or, particularly in the recent work, they lay bare the ghastliness and vulgarity of an industry that aims to service desire so thoroughly, so instantly.’ — The Guardian

 

______________
Bjørn Nørgaard & Lene Adler Petersen The Female Christ (1970)
‘Five subsections. a) The female Christ crucified at Roskilde Fjord. b) The female Christ on the stock exchange. c) The female Christ stands in front of a cross in a backyard on Nørrebro. d) Female body with breasts and exposing bare on a lawn. e) Exhibition of Bjørn Nørgaard’s “fucking machines”. The female Christ is hung naked in this and eventually has intercourse with Nørgaard.’ — Danish Film Institute

 

______________
Joan Semmel Various (1971 – 1979)
‘In the early 1970s, painter Joan Semmel reacted to finding herself surrounded by images of objectified women in all sorts of media, from pornographic magazines on newsstands to old master paintings in museums. She became active in feminist art circles in New York City and took up painting erotic subjects. This body of work made visible sexual pleasure from a woman’s perspective.’ — is.edu

 

______________
Showa University Showa Hanako 2 (2011)
‘Love Doll Technology Applied to Dental Practice. The robots mouth is designed to be as realistic as possible, down to the way that it feels. The creators of this dental bot got help from an unusual source in order to create that realism. Orient Industry, a company that is recognized as one of Japans top makers of sex dolls, was consulted to help the research team make up realistic skin, tongue and mouth areas. The system is also equipped with a basic program for voice recognition; this allows the training dentist to carry out some basic conversation with the robot during the exam or procedure.’ — phys.org

 

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Elizabeth Jaeger Maybe We Die So The Love Doesn’t Have To (2015)
‘A young woman who makes big, bizarre figurative sculpture, Jaeger should be applauded for being risky, in bad taste, and making overt commentary about sexuality, gender, misogyny, and many other topics that most of us would rather avoid.’ — Kelly Traxter

 

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Dom Barra PiratePornoMaterial 2nd 71 (2015)
‘Basically what I do is… [appropriation] via “save as”+ screen-capturing / [remixxxing] via databending >>> [producing] && [problemizing] distribution and consumption {of porn} via dirty new media DIY practices focusing on professional and amateur players in the realm of cyber sex && pornography, the various (sub)-realities canalized&connected&&defined by communication toolz & peculiar languages influenced by the ever growing and dynamic and and shapeshifting inter(net)worked social/ political// economical/// technological scenarios.’ — Dom Barra

 

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Vika Kirchenbauer Please Relax Now (2014)
‘On screen the artist introduces herself, addressing the spectator directly and seeking their trust. Haunting and seductive in a televisual or billboard-like sense, she asks the spectator to lean back and relax, promising that she – the artist – will orchestrate a memorable event that will transform the spectator into an integral part of the art piece – or make them even become the art piece! The artist keeps provoking the spectators with sexy language before they are guided towards the “orgasm-as-event”. The piece ends with the artist exclaiming in full excitement “And now: exhibit yourself to the others!” as the screen turns white and fills the space with light.’ — vk0ms

Excerpt

 

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Carolee Thea Sabine Woman (Central Park Jogger) (1991)
Installation, chicken wire figures (life size), electrical wire, sockets and bulbs.

 

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Dash Snow Untitled (2001-2009)
‘The images of friends, lovers, and vagabonds, encountered passed out or asleep, defaced and down-and-out or conversely beautiful and calm, serve as either intimate portraits or voyeurism—the interpretation often debated about Snow’s repertoire in general. Although his Polaroids remain a major part of his artistic legacy, Snow had moved on to also work in collage, sculpture, installation, and super 8 film.’ — Art Observed

 

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Kalil Haddad My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting (2025)
‘My Secret Boyfriend is a doomed love story told through distorted stills from an erotic photoshoot. It begins with title cards—his preferred mode of exposition—typeset over crimson storm clouds, which set the scene of a teenager plagued by visions of the future. On a rainy morning, with parents out of town, his boyfriend comes to visit. These images—make-outs and handjobs on the couch, fellatio in the shower, tender intercourse on the bedsheets—are reframed, remixed, and recontextualized by Haddad’s virtual camera, with a dreamy score morphing from sexy slo-mo beats to an ethereal, piano-laced soundscape as an impending tragedy draws closer.

‘Screams and gunshots play atop an image of the two embracing at arms-length, strobing from black-and-white to deep red. “That night, as he lay in dreams between my arms, I decided I would never speak to him again,” hovers over the screen. Blood seeps through blurred, shaky footage of wounded bodies and first responders, ending on a freeze-frame of a man at the camera operator’s feet. This abstract portrayal of the preemptive measures the narrator takes to shield himself from a portended loss raises questions about the inveterate fear that courses through the elations of queer romance. We are inundated with narratives of hateful violence, taught to believe that we and our loved ones might be destined for such a fate; the narrator’s father also had visions, but they dissipated when he settled down with a wife.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** adrian, Hey, ciao to you. February, cool, just keep me informed when the time is right. ** Steeqhen, Figured so. Nord VPN, thanks, I’ll look into it. How is the Who shop? Oh, gosh, I don’t actually believe I’ve read your dissertation yet, forgetful me. But I’ll nail it down and do that. I wouldn’t worry, I’m sure it’s wonderful. ** jay, Haha, yeah, the drinking corpse juice thing is a major detail, I think too. I was just having dinner with a friend last night who was flabbergasted and kind of hostile about my Proust resistance, so there you go. Fuck consensus! They say it’ll be a teeny bit warmer here today, and I think I believe them. Boy, the snow sure was pretty though. ** Charalampos, Well, I fixed the blog thing thanks to the tip of a commenter here, but if you tried to see it before about 5 pm yesterday, you could’ve. ** kenley, Hi, henley! Welcome, and thank you a lot for coming in here. Strangely, a friend, the writer Tosh Berman, who comments here sometimes, actually talked to Elisa Lam on the day she disappeared. He was shopping at this bookstore called The Last Bookstore, which is just down the street from the hotel, and she came in and walked up to him and, according to him, started talking randomly and incoherently about something he didn’t understand at length and then turned and fled the store. So I guess she was going through something. Lafcadio Hearn … no, I don’t think I’ve read him. Do you have a suggestion as to where to start with him, or will it be clear once I look him up? Thanks! Obviously feel more than free to make yourself at home here as much as you would like. ** Laura, If memory serves my favorite books about Rimbaud were Graham Robb’s bio and Alain Borer’s book about his Abyssinia period. Oh, I don’t really want to get into what some writers got wrong about me or my work. I don’t care if they mischaracterise my work because there’s nothing I can do about that, I just don’t like when people write things about me personally that aren’t true. But I don’t want to call them up. There’s no value therein. Congrats on your post-med victory. How are you hanging at this point? ** Connie, Hi. That hotel famously had very bad vibes. I can’t remember its history clearly, but all kinds of fucked up stuff happened there over the decades. I think the hotel is all gentrified and remodelled now, but I’m not 100% sure of that. I seem to have very poor radar when it comes to locational bad vibes. Like when we were shooting our previous film ‘Permanent Green Light’, there was one location, an abandoned boathouse, where we shot one scene — where Roman buys the explosives, if you’ve seen it — and the place completely freaked out the cast and crew to the point that, between every shot, everyone had to go outside and chill for a while before we shot the next take. And I didn’t feel anything. Yay about your nice mom’s generosity. Yes, keep me informed as the time passes. Great! Congrats! I’ll look for wonderfulness today, and you too, yeah? ** _Black_Acrylic, I’ve been in those rabbit holes. The Elisa Lam thing is genuinely unsolvable, which is something special. ** Uday, ‘Werckmeister Harmonies’ is my favorite Tarr. That quotation’s a beauty. Huh, I’ll try texting in an ejaculatory rhythm and see what happens. Who should I text accordingly, I wonder. Hm. ** Dev, Oh, yes, I just searched for king cake, and it is certainly different, looking at least. It’s way too flagrantly colorful to be popular here in France, I think. But it does seem to also have a secret baked-in prize. Interesting. Luck with the French immersion school. That would be cool. No, no Mardi Gras parade here. The French don’t tend to go that wild in public, unless they’re rioting, I guess. They do do that. ** KMB, Hi! Thanks a lot. I followed your instruction, and, yes, you were precisely right about how I accidentally managed to darken the blog for a day. Slip of my finger, I guess. But now it’s right again. Really, thanks a bunch. How are you? ** Brendan, Hi, B! I know, Tarr, what a loss, even though he’d retired. Right, you’re near the Cecil. Am I right that it’s been gentrified, or is it still a run down spook house? ** Carsten, Mm, I don’t know. I guess it can’t be squared. My anarchism has never been successfully challenged by its contextual incongruity. Compromised in ways, sure, no choice there. I know of that what you speak about subterranean LA. It’s still there, boxed in but fully extant. One of the reasons I love the place and why pretty much every detective novel of note is set there and why Lynch is Lynch, etc. ** Lucas, Thanks. A lot of syllables there, but I kind of like that. You could use the really low dosage patch. It can’t hurt, I don’t think? Agreed about the power of the Lam case, and beautifully put. You’re such a good writer, pal. ** HaRpEr //, Yeah, I was just saying that it can’t be a coincidence that LA is detective novel and serial killer central. The amount of negative space in LA is so inspiring. I mean, almost all of my books are set there, and that’s not just because I lived there. Unfortunately, your doctor is probably right, but ugh. Any upswinging yet? ** Steve, Yesterday was completely horrible, and I have little doubt that today will be even more so. William Tyler … not sure I know his work. Not really apropos, but I’m about to check out that album by the guitarist who has transcribed Autechre’s work into solo guitar. Very curious. Yesterday I went down a little Shuggie Otis rabbit hole. Such interesting work, the early 70s stuff. ** horatio, Hi! I’m feeling close to normal again, thanks. Unlike you, shit, so sorry. I hope it stays just a briefly annoying cold. Guilty pleasures … hm, I don’t think I feel guilty for liking anything even if other people think what I like is dumb. I feel like I can always make an intellectual case for it. Although that’s not to say the cases I could make would be convincing to anyone. I usually have about a week to a week and a half’s worth of future blog posts ready to go, so, if I die today, I guess the blog could eerily continue for a short time, although no one knows the password of my blog, so never mind. Feel better instantly! ** darbz (⊙ _ ⊙ ), Hey, bud. I think that’s an excellent bio. It tells the tale factually and is compelling to speculate about. I think you nailed it. Send it off into the ether, I say. This, if that link works, are the falafels in question. xo. ** Okay. Utterly self-explanatory post for you today. See you tomorrow.