December 30, 2003
surrealism & sexuality#2
Trevor, I'd always understood surrealism to be an European art movement that happened in the 1930s and 1940s, but had died out with Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism in New York. New York then ruled the art world.
Well, that's what the books produced by the art institution always tell us, do they not?
But a surrealism connected to a desire to live a better life lives on, does it not?
In an earlier post I said:
"Today we should be thinking of sexual desire interpreted through the dream-like surreality of sexual fantasy that is given cultural shape by sexual torture, perversion or a sexual wound."
Here are two recent examples that express the above paragraph by the same artist:
Cathy de Monchaux, Dangerous Fragility, 1994.
And:
Cathy de Monchaux,
This expression of sexuality trangresses experiencing desire from a male perspective or as a narcissistic gaze within a patriarchal culture. It also transgresses the conventions of Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller and even Pauline Reage's Story of O.
This transgression can be seen Catherine Breillat's Romance. It flimed sequence of actual sex that transgresses the simulated sex of the money shot and the cream pie shot of the pornographic "underground." These, with their close-up shots of male and female genitals, are designed within a minimal narrative to arouse the male viewer and facilitate his masturbation and orgasm.
Where do we go with the trangressions of patriarchal and pornographic conventions?
'Romance' shows us. It restores explicit images of sexuality that have almost become the preserve of capitalist pornography. It works within the narrative and character conventions of mainstream Hollywood films to explore both the pornographic image and peel back the mythic layers of seductive romance to discover the meaning of sexuality for themselves. It takes back the explicit sexual images that have been colonised by the porn industry and then reworks them. The character is a women who dedicates her life to the freedom of the sexual pleasure.
This is what some of the sexblogs are exploring. A lot of women writing sex blogs use the explict porn images of erect male penises for their own pleasure. They, as free desiring subjects, have questioned the standard view that pornography only speaks about men to men.
This unsettles the porn conventions as does their reworking of the male sadomasochistic scenarios. Like Romance, and the 1954 Story of O before it, these sexblogs written by women are about female desire and sexual pleasure in a predominantly heterosexual and phallocentric world.
As the Elfi Mikesh & Monika Treut 1985 film, Seduction the Cruel Women, makes explicit, women are now exercising power for their own sexual pleasure.
Surrealism lives on through a conscious questioning of the meaning of pornography.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 30, 2003 08:36 AM | TrackBack