viz. - Pornography

World Erotic Art Museum

hoag — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:29:16 +0000

“Do not cede your desire" – Jacques Lacan

"Desire is a gift in life” – Chris Corner (IAMX)

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, is a brilliant study in desire as well as an implicit deconstruction of the opposition between pornography and art. My recent visit there thus not only provided me with much food for thought and aesethetic enjoyment, but certainly tickled my loins. The WEAM (yes, even the acronym for the joint sounds suspiciously erotic) has captured the hearts not only of Floridians, but art-lovers from all around the world as well, so I'd love to have the pleasure of sharing my experience of the museum with you.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

The first thing one notices about the WEAM is its location. Hidden away on the second floor of its respective building, the WEAM can be easy to miss, but I think this stands as key to its role as part of Miami Beach’s cultural unconscious—i.e., as images of 1,000 “competing” desires tucked away from apparent view. One ascends to the WEAM in a rickety elevator and finds oneself in the gift shop suddenly surrounded by erotic books, t-shirts, postcards, and piggy banks made to look like sperm cells. After sheepishly paying the $15 to enter, the thought occurs: “Just how trashy is this place going to be?” But within seconds after entering the exhibits, any notion that the WEAM is less than a collection of artistic genius is thoroughly dashed.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

Nothing overcomes the idea that the WEAM is reducible to a pornographic peep show more than its septuagenarian collector and curator, Naomi Wilzig, whom I had the pleasure of meeting during my visit. Wilzig, who has been putting together the WEAM’s collection for the past twenty years, is a grandmother whose professional accomplishments have spanned a lifetime. She quietly moves through the museum thinking and observing, seemingly quiet and demure. However, discussing Wilzig’s collection or its purpose with her quickly reveals a fierce, uncompromising intellect and a vision to match it. In Wilzig's words, “[the WEAM is] an education and it’s an awakening that we all are sexual beings, in case you didn’t notice it, or didn’t remember it, or didn’t know it. And that the human body and sexual acts shouldn’t be forbidden but brought out into the open in their honesty and in their purity and in the fact that it expresses the love that people have for each other.”

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

The range of Wilzig’s collection itself is massive, so it's not surprising that my own journey through the WEAM took nearly three hours. Rather than dryly recounting everything that one can find there, let me share my impressions instead. I remember the mythologies of Adam and Eve as well as Leda and the Swan depicted in dozens of stunning ways. I remember works both praising and condemning Lady Godiva and Katherine the Great. I remember Zeus and his many loves surrounded by, appropriately enough, ancient Roman sex toys and figurines. And as I reached the museum’s “center,” I remember the impressive cultural range of the collection with its pieces from Africa and Indonesia, China, Japan, Mexico, France, and more, including contemporary pieces from “masters” such as Picasso and Klimt. There is also a large collection of wooden carvings, furniture, and body casts; photos of pin-up girls, Josephine Baker, and Marilyn Monroe; a bevy of erotic images hidden in almost every household object imaginable; fetish art; lesbian, gay, and bisexual photographs, and much more . Near the exit one can even find the infamous phallic murder weapon from the film A Clockwork Orange.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

It is a serious understatement to say that the WEAM provides a lot for a theorist of desire to ponder. For example, that the museum is called the World “Erotic” Art Museum rather than the “Sexual” Art Museum aligns its aims with the Foucauldian view that “sexuality” and the categories of sexual identity are fairly recent inventions, whereas the erotic exchanges between bodies and pleasures are much "older." Moreover, with a keen eye one can discern histories of desire and histories of sexuality being produced as one builds narratives while traversing through the museum. These histories of desire and sexuality not only teach one something about history (that it is indeed produced), but also provide a philosophical hammer with which one can smash seemingly intractable notions about what constitute “proper” or “moral” or “correct” desires today. However, while traversing the museum one may also feel the Foucauldian worry concerning the monitoring of desire, that is, by “liberating” our desire and making it visible and public that we simultaneously open it to normative surveillance and control.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

There is also a fascinating rhetoric operating throughout the WEAM’s collection, making it difficult to tell whether the vocabularies employed are being used euphemistically, for the purposes of academic legitimization (e.g., the word “tumescent” is used innumerable times), or something else altogether. One also gets the wonderfully dizzying impression that the collection is amassed independently of a morally-judgmental eye, that is, one finds images of erotic encounters of all kinds and between all types of beings (i.e., not only hetero-normative and anthropo-normative images). One thus feels as though the WEAM is a space where flows of desire can operate in a more unfettered fashion, where desiring-machines are increasingly capable of “hooking up” and sharing affects as well as bodily fluids (N.B., the museum contains particularly large restrooms hidden away in the rear of the exhibits).

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

Perhaps what I’m suggesting, then, is that the WEAM operates in accordance with an Lacanian/Deleuzian ethics of desire, an ethics where desire is allowed to breathe, rather than attempting to eliminate or yolk it. The museum challenges us to ask whether we have acted in conformity with our desire as part of an ethical life, and challenges us to consider what explosive effects follow when desire (and/as the unconscious-nonconscious) is problematically and systematically bridled. The WEAM also asks us to consider what it is possible for us to do with our bodies, and to consider the range of experience and experiments that a body is capable of (that is, the museum asks us to confront not only the organs of our bodies, but also our bodies without organs). In sum, the museum relentlessly demands that we come to see ourselves as desiring beings, ones that produce desire in response to the call of living. Indeed the WEAM calls us to see immanent life itself as the unfolding and striving of desire.

Image Credit: World Erotic Art Museum

So if you’re ever in Miami Beach, check out the WEAM. Let it call you into the problem-questions of art and desire. And while you’re at it, don’t be afraid of that stirring in the loins. It’s all part of the experience. We swear that it won’t affect your vision or the hairiness of your palms…

(Re)Constructing Bodies - Zackary Canepari's Art and the Real Girl

Cate Blouke — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:00:25 +0000

An image series of Real Dolls from photographer Zackary Canepari's blog

No, this isn't a photo-essay about the box of human heads found on a Southwest Airlines flight last June. But it's still a bit creepy. The ominous and evocative image above is from series of photos by Zackary Canepari, documenting the construction of Real Dolls - anatomically correct mannequins that run about $6,000 for those in the market. Not safe for work content after the jump.

An image series of Real Dolls from photographer Zackary Canepari's blog

You may remember the 2007 independent film, Lars and the Real Girl, which brought these otherwise obscure pieces of paraphernalia into the public eye. The quirky romantic comedy (with its PG-13 rating) rather skimmed over the sexual associations/use of the dolls in favor of a banal and sweet story about a lonely and socially maladjusted guy who just needed some company. But in this series of eerie photographs and short "documentary" video (bottom), photographer Zackary Canepari unearths a fragmentary and artistic approach to the life-size sex toys.

The images are uncanny and reminiscent of forensic labs or anatomy lessons. The rows of feet and teeth, framed by soft-focus, negative space, serve to disassociate the objects from the bodies they will be attached to, recalling notions of mechanization and assembly line production.

Despite how realistic the body parts may seem, the metal studs and exposed plastic remind us that these are manufactured, constructed objects. And, as a woman, it's somewhat unsettling to consider that creator Matt McMullen is literally building female bodies at the behest of male consumers.

However, Canepari's images, and especially the film, focus on the artistry involved in the creation of these "women." Regardless of any dubious or unresolved feelings I might have about the dolls' use, each one is unique, and their life-like quality isn't achieved without a certain craftsmanship.

I think that the images do evoke a kind of horror in objectifying the body. The photo above is especially serial killer-esque with its faceless plastic skulls and bodies suspended from the ceiling. And yet, I find it strangely compelling and beautiful at the same time.

In the video (below) Canepari interviews Matt McMullen, casting the creator as a skilled artist deeply invested in his creations. McMullen explains that he began with an interest in making a mannequin that was somehow more real than display models - something with curves, not super-model skinny.

"Honey Pie" from Zackary Canepari's video website

Meat is Murder, PETA is Porn

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Imogen Bailey; image from http://www.imogenbailey.com/peta.html

It's not news to say that PETA, in its quest to protect animals, regularly objectifies women in disturbing and disturbingly consistent ways. We've had a couple of posts on viz. already that discuss some of PETA's tactics, such as Posing for Your Eating Habits and the Girls-Gone-Wild parody examined in Ugh! Milk Gone Bad. I object to PETA's ads both for how they perpetuate some of the worst sexism and objectification and for how they are counterproductive; I am a PETA-hating vegetarian. But the trainwreck that is their media campaign is, at least, provocative, if nothing else (which, I suppose, is their "strategy"). Now, PETA has done it again with a new set of videos and pictures that connect eating vegetables to pornography, which they call the "Veggie Love Casting Session". Before we look at "Veggie Love," however, I thought I'd share a few salient images that demonstrate how it is a logical outgrowth of their previous work.

Warning: the rest of the images in this post are NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

All images from PETA.org

The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent. Indeed, the "Veggie Love" ads make clear PETA's alliance with the values and visual motifs of porn:

Veggie Love Casting Session screenshots from http://features.peta.org/casting-session/default.aspx

Playing on the designs of paid pornography websites, the PETA site promises "explicit casting footage" starring bikini-clad women (and one man) in the throes of passion... with their vegetables of choice. Visual allusions to fellatio recur throughout the images and videos. The message, again, is one equating vegetarianism with sex. It makes me wonder who the audience is. Since most of the celebrity spokespeople for PETA are women and most vegetarians are women (a 1992 report claims 68%), perhaps PETA is trying to induce more men to give up meat. Is PETA implicitly promising naked women to men who "go veg"?

Regardless, it's yet another sad entry in the hall of shame that is PETA. I sometimes wonder if the organization is funded by the meat industry. What better way to discredit vegetarianism and animal rights than to make their most outspoken proponents seem like sexist lunatics?

American Apparel's Imagined Bodies

Megan Eatman — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:47:07 +0000

Cropped version of American Apparel ad by Boris Lopez

I hate to be talking about this, because I hate to be one of the many people giving American Apparel attention, but I can't help but find their recently released ads, which feature line drawings of nude, young-looking women, worthy of commentary. While American Apparel's ads usually contain some degree of nudity, their foray into line drawing rather than a particular photographic aesthetic seems to invoke, maybe too obviously, questions about the nature of pornography in a virtual world. More photos, which are not suitable for work, after the jump.

While the critiques of American Apparel's ads are numerous, I have always found their ads more over-the-top and obvious than offensive (their policies--like not selling some items over a size 6--are another story). AA forgoes subtext in favor of selling sex as obviously as it possibly can; the clothes themselves are barely featured, and and young women's bodies become the primary consumable. These line drawings clearly follow that pattern. While the slogan "You can feel how good it looks" may ostensibly refer to the woman who would purchase and wear cotton undergarments, the drawing's beckoning expression suggests that it is, in fact, the observer who can "feel" how good the underwear looks through his/her attraction to the model.

One of the most noticeable features of these ads is, of course, the models' apparent youth. AA has always pursued a youthful aesthetic, forbidding its female employees from having "unnatural" haircuts, performing any obvious eyebrow grooming, or wearing more than minimal makeup, so the use of youthful women is not out of the ordinary. What interested me about these ads is that they could have been photographs; there are certainly models who look extremely young but are of legal age, and AA has obtained models from a variety of sources to get an "amateur" look (although it is untrue that, as the company claims, all of their models are amateurs). The use of provocative, underage-appearing line drawings calls attention to the line between fantasy and reality without fully surpassing it. Interestingly, the slogan could be used in arguments for legislation (extant in, for example, Australia and Canada) that forbids images that portray child sexual abuse even if no actual children were involved. By suggesting that this image, which draws attention to its own un-reality, can still inspire sexual sensation, the slogan suggests that the way a viewer feels about a drawing of an underage girl and a picture of an underage girl might not be that different.

Fish Porn

Nate Kreuter — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:50:23 +0000

I am a desperately addicted fly fisherman, (click here to see my favorite fly fishing blog, Sexyloops) and I recently took note of the pornographic qualities of a genre of angling pictures. In an era of catch-and-release fishing it's customary for fishermen and fisherwomen to pose for impressive shots with their catches before returning their catch (hopefully) safely to the water. Consider this typical example:

Yes, I went out of my way to find an example of "fish porn" with a mustache in the frame, guilty. I'm also not the first to notice the fish porn genre.

I've begun to think of these images as "fish porn" because they present, like other forms of pornography, often unrealistic ideals, and in anglers, they produce physiological responses of lust and anticipation. I'm not condemning the images, but it's an odd correlation in my mind. I am sometimes repulsed by the images at times. I know they're just keepsakes, reminders of a fishing trip, but sometime there is a trophy quality in the images that makes me uncomfortable.

In response, here is an example of my own fly fishing anti-porn, the smallest trout I have ever caught on a fly, a small brook trout from a secret stream in Virginia: