20.11.07

ΛΟΝΔΙΝΟ. ΑΠΟΠΛΑΝΗΣΗ ΤΩΡΑ. ΤΕΧΝΗ ΚΑΙ ΣΕΞ ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΤΗΤΑ ΜΕΧΡΙ ΣΗΜΕΡΑ

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Andy Warhol: Blowjob - Robert Mapplethorpe: Helmut NYC
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Αποπλάνηση τώρα
Της ΠΑΡΗΣ ΣΠΙΝΟΥ (Ελευθεροτυπία, 11/11/2007 )
Οταν τον 19ο αιώνα η βασίλισσα Βικτόρια επισκέφθηκε την Ιταλία, ο δούκας της Τοσκάνης φρόντισε να καλύψει με ένα τεράστιο γύψινο φύλλο συκής τα επίμαχα σημεία του γυμνού «Δαβίδ», του περίφημου αγάλματος του Μιχαήλ Αγγέλου, προκειμένου να μην κοκκινίσει από ντροπή η κραταιά κυρία του Ηνωμένου Βασιλείου και μητέρα εννέα παιδιών. Αυτό το φύλλο που κρεμόταν από τέσσερα σιδερένια καρφιά πάνω στο γλυπτό εισάγει τον επισκέπτη στην έκθεση «Αποπλάνηση. Τέχνη και σεξ από την αρχαιότητα μέχρι σήμερα», στο κέντρο τεχνών «Μπάρμπικαν».
Η έκθεση αποτελεί μια διαδρομή 2.000 χρόνων στην απεικόνιση της ερωτικής πράξης, μέσα από 250 έργα που σημάδεψαν την εποχή τους: από τις αποκαλυπτικές τοιχογραφίες της Πομπηίας και τους αρχαιοελληνικούς Πριάπους, μέχρι τα τροφαντά γυμνά της Αναγέννησης. Από το Κάμα Σούτρα μέχρι τα φλογερά σχέδια του Ροντέν, τις φετιχιστικές φωτογραφίες του Μάπλθορπ και το πορνό-κιτς του Τζεφ Κουνς.
Ο επισκέπτης καλείται να ανακαλύψει πώς οι καλλιτέχνες, σε διαφορετικές εποχές και διαφορετικούς πολιτισμούς, έκαναν εικόνα το σεξ. Πώς άλλαζαν τα στιλ και η αισθητική, ενώ η ερωτική επιθυμία παρέμενε αμείωτη. Πώς τα όρια του προκλητικού και απαγορευμένου άλλοτε διευρύνονταν και άλλοτε αμβλύνονταν, ενώ από τα μέσα του 20ού αιώνα άρχισαν να πέφτουν και τα τελευταία ταμπού.
Οσοι όμως περιμένουν να δουν ερωτικές ακρότητες, όπως τις μαζοχιστικές περφόρμανς της Μαρίνας Αμπράμοβιτς, μάλλον θα απογοητευτούν. Γιατί αυτή η έκθεση για το σεξ, η μεγαλύτερη που έχει παρουσιαστεί μέχρι σήμερα στο Λονδίνο, χαρακτηρίζεται «μέινστριμ». «Η αυτοϊκανοποίηση και ο φετιχισμός είναι μέσα. Η παιδοφιλία και οι βίαιες πράξεις είναι έξω» διευκρινίζει η Κέτι Μπους, επικεφαλής του τμήματος τέχνης του «Μπάρμπικαν». «Είναι μια μεγάλη έκθεση για την οπτική ιστορία της αναπαράστασης της σεξουαλικής εμπειρίας. Δεν ορίζουμε τι σοκάρει. Τα όρια είναι προσωπικά του καθενός».
Ακατάλληλο για ανηλίκους
Ωστόσο, οι επιμελητές της «Αποπλάνησης» έθεσαν εξαρχής τα όρια, απαγορεύοντας την είσοδο σε όσους είναι κάτω των 18 ετών. Πριν από τα εγκαίνια, στα μέσα Οκτωβρίου, η αστυνομία πέρασε για να ελέγξει τα έργα και έδωσε το τελικό ΟΚ. Αυτή όμως η λογοκρισία έδωσε έναυσμα να αρχίσει η συζήτηση στα μπλογκ των βρετανικών εφημερίδων για το τι είναι και τι δεν είναι πορνογραφία, ενώ μερικοί εύλογα αναρωτιούνται: «Πώς γίνεται τα ίδια έργα που παρουσιάζονται ελεύθερα στο Μητροπολιτικό, στο Βικτόρια και Αλμπερτ και στα μεγάλα μουσεία της Ευρώπης και της Αμερικής να είναι απαγορευμένα για τους ανηλίκους στο "Μπάρμπικαν";.
Μερικοί ίσως παρηγορηθούν μαθαίνοντας ότι αρκετά μουσεία, όπως το Βρετανικό ή της Νάπολης, διατηρούσαν «μυστικά δωμάτια» στα τέλη του 18ου αιώνα, τα οποία άνοιγαν τις πύλες τους μόνο στους μυημένους επισκέπτες, καθώς εκεί φυλάσσονταν τα πλέον αποκαλυπτικά αριστουργήματα της αρχαιότητας. «Ιδιαίτερη προτίμηση έδειχναν στην συλλογή αρχαίων φαλλών», σύμφωνα με την καθηγήτρια του Πανεπιστημίου Τέχνης του Λονδίνου Μαρίνα Ουάλας. «Θεωρούνταν αντικείμενα τύχης. Οπως τα ανδρικά γεννητικά όργανα ανεβαίνουν και κατεβαίνουν χωρίς έλεγχο, έτσι και η τύχη έρχεται και φεύγει, χωρίς προειδοποίηση...».
Σε ένα τέτοιο «μυστικό δωμάτιο» του Μουσείου της Νάπολης είχαν κλείσει στις αρχές του 19ου αιώνα και τις προκλητικές τοιχογραφίες της Πομπηίας επειδή θεωρούσαν ότι απεικόνιζαν ανήθικες πράξεις. Οι περίτεχνες γιαπωνέζικες ξυλογραφίες με ζευγάρια σε περίπλοκες συνευρέσεις προορίζονταν για τα πορνεία και τους πιο ιδιωτικούς χώρους των σπιτιών. Οι κινέζικοι πίνακες με τρυφερές ερωτικές σκηνές μέσα σε ανθισμένους κήπους είχαν απαγορευτεί και καταστραφεί την εποχή του Μάο. Ομως στο Ισλάμ, πριν αυτό φορέσει μπούργκα, όλα επιτρέπονταν, όπως αποκαλύπτει ένα αραβικό χειρόγραφο του 18ου αιώνα, που δείχνει 10 άντρες να επιδίδονται σε ομαδικό όργιο!
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Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Mustafa Al-Misri Tuhfet Ul-Mulk
(a Turkish translation of Ruju as-Shaykh ila sibah), 1773
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Αν το εκκλησιαστικό κατεστημένο ταύτιζε για αιώνες το σεξ με την αμαρτία, οι καλλιτέχνες πάντα εύρισκαν τον τρόπο να ξεγλιστρούν, με πρόσχημα και τους αρχαίους μύθους. Ετσι, ο Μπουσέ ζωγράφισε την Λήδα ημίγυμνη να περιμένει με ανυπομονησία τον Δία, που είχε μεταμορφωθεί σε κύκνο, ενώ ο ίδιος θεός αποπλανά και την Αντιόπη σε έναν από τους πίνακες του Ρέμπραντ. Η έκθεση περιλαμβάνει και τις «Στάσεις», τα ερωτικά έργα του 16ου αιώνα του Τζούλιο Ρομάνο, που έγιναν χαρακτικά από τον Μαρκαντόνιο Ραϊμόντι και σκανδάλισαν τόσο, ώστε οι αρχές της εποχής να τον συλλάβουν για παραγωγή άσεμνου υλικού.
Πικάσο και Ντε Σαντ
Σπάνιες ινδιάνικες μινιατούρες, πορνογραφικά βιβλία που συνδέονται με τη γέννηση της τυπογραφίας και τα οποία για ευνόητους λόγους χωράνε στην παλάμη ενός χεριού, μια επιλογή από τα 7.000 ερωτικά σχέδια που είχε κάνει ο ακαταπόνητος Ροντέν συγκαταλέγονται στα πιο ενδιαφέροντα εκθέματα. Πολλοί ξαφνιάζονται βλέποντας τα γυμνά που σχεδίαζε στα σημειωματάριά του ο γνωστός για τα ήρεμα τοπία του Τέρνερ, αλλά και τον πίνακα με τίτλο «La douleur» που φιλοτέχνησε το 1903 ο Πικάσο και απεικονίζει μια ερωτική σκηνή με ένα αγόρι.
Ο Πικάσο δεν ήταν ο μόνος που έσπρωξε πιο πέρα τα όρια της σύγχρονης τέχνης. Αρκεί να δει κανείς το βίντεο «Blowjob» του Αντι Γουόρχολ, που εστιάζει στο πρόσωπο ενός νέου σε στιγμή έκστασης. Τον μιμήθηκε αργότερα η Κ. Ρ. Μπάξι, κάνοντας το ίδιο, με μια γυναίκα όμως στο πλάνο. Ο Ρόμπερτ Μάπλθορπ με τις φωτογραφίες του στιλιζάρισε το φετίχ, ο Τζεφ Κουνς έδειξε το κιτς στον κόσμο της πορνογραφίας όπου πρωταγωνιστούσε η «δασκάλα» του είδους Τσιτσιολίνα, ο Αράκι συνεχίζει στο ίδιο μοτίβο, αλά ιαπωνικά.
Η έκθεση, που θα διαρκέσει μέχρι τον ερχόμενο Ιανουάριο, περιλαμβάνει και κείμενα που ήταν απαγορευμένα, όπως το Κάμα Σούτρα, τις ιστορίες του Μαρκήσιου ντε Σαντ, τη «Λολίτα» του Ναμπόκοφ. Στην επιστημονική προσέγγιση του σεξ κυριαρχούν οι περίφημες έρευνες του δρα. Κίνσεϊ στη συντηρητική Αμερική της δεκαετίας του '40 και του '50.
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Tracey Emin: Is Legal Sex Anal?

2 σχόλια:

erva_cidreira είπε...

Beyond lust


The brilliant new exhibition Art and Sex raises the question: has art ever been about anything else? By Jonathan Jones

Tuesday October 16, 2007
The Guardian

Red lips and a rose nipple inflame the cool flesh of Egon Schiele's model as she leans back and, blue eyes looking off to the side, lifts her ruffled skirt to show the artist what he wants to see.
You could not exclude Schiele from an exhibition entitled Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to the Present. Nor could you exclude his Viennese contemporary, Gustav Klimt, whose Reclining Masturbating Girl hangs nearby, nor Picasso, whose painting of himself at the age of about 20 being fellated is in the same room. And yet there's something about that title, "art and sex", that doesn't quite do justice to these artists. It implies that art can sometimes be about things other than sex - and I'm not sure if Schiele or Picasso ever believed it could. I'm not sure if I believe it myself.

This summer, while looking at ice age art in caves in France, I saw breasts and buttocks drawn by some ice age Picasso perhaps 25,000 years ago. People have been making erotica, or pornography, or whatever you want to call it, far longer than the 2,500 years this exhibition surveys. And you have to ask: has art ever been about anything else? As soon as the Greeks invented a lifelike way of depicting the human form, in the sixth century BC, they exploited their discovery to portray sex - as this show illustrates. Who was the beautiful Sapphic red-figure painting of two slender women with triangular breasts and curvy buttocks meant to be enjoyed by?
My one quibble with this show is how misleading it would be to think that sex is somehow a marginalised or hidden theme in art. Just consider the National Gallery, where Bronzino's perverse Venus and Cupid, Titian's mordant Diana and Actaeon, Velázquez's coolly sensual Rokeby Venus, Rembrandt's wonderfully intimate bedroom portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels, and the late works of Degas could all have been included in this show. The theme is potentially limitless, and to isolate "sex" in art might almost have something puritanical about it, a clinical scrupulousness.

But we live in a world that fears erotically charged images. Pornography is loathed even as it is consumed. In Britain, there has been a recent moral panic about one of the artists in this show, Nan Goldin, whose photograph of a naked young girl was removed from an exhibition at Gateshead's Baltic Centre. That is the modern version of anxieties that for centuries drove artists to veil passion in fine ideas. This show includes a copy of Michelangelo's drawing of The Rape of Ganymede, which he gave as a present to a young nobleman he adored, and which portrays Jupiter taking the form of an eagle to carry away a boy he lusted after.

Michelangelo was influenced by the Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino when he claimed that when he looked at male beauty it led him up into the pure spiritual realm, beyond lust.

By the 18th century, this doublethink produced the idea of the "nude" as a somehow lustless depiction of the human form. This idea was still so current in the early 20th century that a philospher could claim: "If the nude is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals." To which the art historian Kenneth Clark replied: "No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even though only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals." Nowadays, we laugh at the very idea of a sexless nude, but we have got our own anxieties, our own difficulties of definition. Does Goldin pander to paedophiles? Between the old worries and the modern ones, sex is still a dangerous subject. The curators of this brilliant exhibition joyously shove it in your face.

I left with a slide show of erotica from all places and times playing in my head, the wet, raw, slithering photography of Nobuyoshi Araki fading into the proud flesh of Louis XV's mistress, Mademoiselle O'Murphy, lying on her front on a chaise longue in a drawing by François Boucher, giving way to 19th-century photographs in which the models pose identically to what you would see in a modern men's magazine, to Rembrandt's moving engraving of lovers with their clothes on on a chilly night. Aubrey Beardsley's drawing of a gigantic penis and an ancient Roman bronze phallus with bells hanging on it; the detailed, ruffled, silken pink vulva of a white-faced courtesan arching her body over in a Japanese woodblock print and Klimt's woman with her legs apart reaching under her turn-of-the-century skirts to touch herself.

In the rush of images, ideas are generated like the babies who, in Leonardo da Vinci's Leda and the Swan - a copy is shown here of this lost masterpiece - hatch from eggs after Leda's encounter with a god who has taken the form of a giant bird. In Robert Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio photographs, his most controversial works that created legal difficulties for American museums after the conservative Right attacked them at the end of the 1980s, men involved in the S&M scene subject themselves and one another to various constraints and tests: Joe is encased in rubber, Jim has his head sealed in a leather mask, and Mapplethorpe himself poses with a whip inserted in his rectum. Shocked? Disturbed? But walk over to the section that shows a lovely series of 18th-century Chinese scenes in which lovers embrace tenderly in a lotus garden. The mood here is infinitely more delicate and gentle - except the woman wears dainty silken bags over her bound feet.

Sex is not an unchanging natural phenomenon. What does that Roman bronze phallus with bells on it actually mean? And when a woman in a Renaissance picture collects phalluses in a basket, is this about "sex" or witchcraft? Mapplethorpe's photographs are a crucial exhibit because they can be viewed as anthropological documents that record a very specific subculture, the same one, as it happens, that attracted the French philosopher Michel Foucault. "You meet men there who are to you as you are to them," Foucault said of his discovery of the American 1970s gay S&M scene. "Nothing but a body with which combinations and productions of pleasure are possible."

Foucault came to believe that if consenting men in 1970s California could invent a new sexuality from nowhere, sex must therefore be neither an unchanging historical constant nor a primordial drive fighting free of "repression", but something cultures make and unmake. This is the argument of his book The History of Sexuality. In European culture since the rise of Christianity, there is no image of sex from which pain and guilt are wholly excluded - the Christian terror is visibly there in illustrations to 18th-century editions of De Sade. Serious post-classical European art has never produced anything quite like the pure, comment-free eroticism of this show's bright Indian illustrations of lovers demonstrating a series of spectacular positions, or Japan's art of the floating world.

Seventeenth-century Japan saw the rise of a new secular culture in the great cities of Edo (modern Tokyo), Osaka and Kyoto. Religious Noh theatre gave way to kabuki theatre with its everyday scenes, and the cities had pleasure districts whose community of the senses was named after the Buddhist term ukiyo, meaning "floating world". Woodblock prints, with their gorgeous colours, record, or rather invent and mythify, this floating world: lovers are suspended far from workaday worries in their own reality of silk and skin. A man pleasures a woman after they have gorged on oysters; the artist enjoys drawing a visual analogy between oyster and vulva. I cannot think of a European equivalent, and it has to do with what art is in different cultures, as much as what sex is.

European art from the Renaissance into modern times was obsessed with the delineation of reality in space and time. Japanese prints are instead decorative explorations of shape and colour: this makes for a much more tactile art. Male and female genitalia are not "shown" to the spectactor like a provocative fact, as they are by Schiele, in Japanese art; their visible presence is natural and is enjoyed by the artist, who draws comparisons with red frilly garments, or in the case of an erect penis, with a bird's beak.

The same sensibility is at work in Araki's shocking, beautiful images from his series Erotos. In fact, these photographs are the only real contemporary erotica in the show. It is proof of how fraught it is, this looking at sex, that in its closing stages the exhibition chickens out and retreats to a safe definition of high art: so we get Thomas Ruff's blurred, artistic appropriations of internet porn, rather than internet porn. It excludes a whole host of material that would challenge taste and definitions of the pornographic far more provocatively. Why include early porn photographs and exclude fetish photographer Elmer Batters? In graphic art, why exclude sexually obsessed cartoonist Robert Crumb? I suppose they wanted to avoid too many questions about pornography and power - they wanted to create a safe "erotic" space. Yet all the questions a critical viewer might ask are asked by Picasso in his series of etchings of the Renaissance master Raphael in bed with his lover, La Fornarina, "the baker's daughter". It was said that Raphael so adored his mistress - and loved sex - that a patron had to install her in his house in order to get Raphael to finish his frescoes there.

I was at first disappointed to find Picasso - the most sexual artist there ever was - represented only by his youthful painting of a blowjob, although it connects him nicely with Andy Warhol's nearby film (Blowjob), which focuses on an ethereal silvery image of a man's face. Picasso etched Raphael and La Fornarina in 1968, near the end of his life. You wouldn't guess it from the way his line enjoys every detail. Did I say western art has nothing to compare with Japanese sensuality? It does - it has Picasso. And yet, and this is what makes Raphael and La Fornarina the greatest work of art in the show, Picasso knows exactly what he is doing: he knows he is too old to be Raphael any more. In most of the prints, the Pope watches from behind draperies or - hilariously - while squatting on a potty. This is the dilemma of anyone seeing the show: in your imagination are you La Fornarina, or her lover, or the Pope watching on his potty? It's a risky business, admitting to how much you enjoy looking at sex. I loved this show, but left feeling sad and ashamed; then I had to come back the next day and look again. It is the bravest and most intelligent exhibition of the year

erva_cidreira είπε...

Erotic art traces history of sex
By Emily Buchanan
BBC News


It's an age-old question. When is art art and when is it simply pornography? A provocative exhibition at the Barbican in central London is helping fuel the debate.

Seduced - Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now contains works spanning 2000 years, by some of the most famous artists in the world, showing human beings in their most intimate moments.

Kate Bush, the Barbican's head of art, has spent five years putting the collection together.

"It's not about porn. It's a thoughtful exhibition, a celebration of what connects all human beings across time and cultures," says Ms Bush.

The aim of the show is to explore the history of what's accepted as art and to throw light on our current attitudes.

And certainly those attitudes have changed. The first exhibit is a cast of the bronze fig leaf which was made so that Queen Victoria would not be offended by the replica of Michelangelo's statue of David in London's Victoria and Albert Museum.

The visitor then passes a room of pottery showing the antics of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, through the voluptuous bodies of the Renaissance to contemporary works such as the stylised satirical photographs by Jeff Koons poking fun at the porn industry.

Martin Kemp is one of the show's curators and a professor of history of art at Oxford University.

'Sex and joy'

He says putting the exhibition together has taught him "how similar we are in terms of images of sex and joy, but also about the unease in the representation of this private act".

"There's no civilisation which hasn't had problems with it," he adds.

The curators have made a point of only including works which show sex between consenting adults. There is nothing which suggests violence or sex with children.

While many of the works can be seen at any major gallery on permanent exhibition, this collection bans under-18s from attending.

Certainly when a work is old it appears to us as more acceptable as art rather than pornography.

Professor Kemp says art is also more complicated than porn, arousing a mixture of emotions. The other big difference is the quality.

"It became clear where pornography stops and art starts," he explains.

"If you look at the frescoes from Herculaneum, they employed major artists.

"If you went to Soho to a brothel today, you don't expect major artists to be deployed.

Destroyed

"If you take the Japanese works, they are very explicit, more so than in the West.

"But the levels of artistry are high, they are sumptuous, beautiful, delicate and refined."

The Japanese prints were made by leading masters including Hokusai. The woodblock prints show men and women in elaborate clothes and equally elaborate poses and were intended for use in brothels and private homes.

There are also Chinese works showing beautiful scenes of gentle love-making in quiet gardens. Chinese erotic art is a little known tradition because so much was destroyed in the Mao era.

The exhibition throws light on how different cultures at different times have viewed sex.

What it reveals above all is how styles of art have changed over the centuries, while human beings and their desires have essentially stayed the same.