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Erotic Art... |
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Tuesday, 01 February 2005 |
Here is a reflection sent to me by Kate Mahoney, a photographer who works with nudes :
"The erotic photo is the nude in repose, amorphous, academic (the nude of the painting studio and sculpture gallery), it is rather the suggestion, the dissimulation of pornography. The pornographic is the dynamic and debauched nude, coarse, insensitive, hot-blooded. The erotic photograph is in black and white; the pornographic takes on colour, with pink predominating; and the participants hair is always damp. The erotic photograph is clean and noble, the pornographic, dirty and trivial. The erotic photograph is often expensive, it is printed on good paper, it can be displayed, hung without shame. The pornographic photograph is printed on glossy paper that creates reflections; we hide it, use it, and then throw it away; we mishandle it, soil it. A model for an erotic photograph must be beautiful, the lighting should be suitable. The subject for pornography can easily be imperfect, paunchy, heís only one element in a carnal mechanism, a face, a model in a catalogue. His is a cut-rate body (a discounted body, the body shown in a magazine is always less expensive than one in a brothel)
But the boundary between the erotic and the pornographic is more problematic; it has to do with commerce. The pornographic is that which is not touched by art (or grace). Many pictures of nudes are sold for the body they represent rather than for the photograph itself. They are sold under the pretext and the protection of art. The erotic photograph can be framed, the pornographic comes wrapped in cellophane, like meat in the supermarket."
Like the writer of this piece, Herve Guibert, I realise that the erotic is a hyper-cleansed model of the pornographic, a kind of sanitised prurience which is licensed by the label of art. But the erotic is also livening, vitalising and engaging. It is contradictory and layered, at once one of the great motivators of human endeavour, and at the same time a sign of our biological animal nature. I think it is a sign of my passion for the visual that my work is erotic.
Now there are a number of things said by M.Guibert that made me cringe, but those are things he said in the 70s, when the border between the erotic and the pornographic were better defined than today. Today, magazines offering flesh on glossy paper abound, and some actually present images that are photographically interesting, even if the main focus is anatomy and gynecology, more often than not. With the over abundance of pornographic material on the internet, can a nude image be seen in an artistic eye, or has pornography ruined the show for the rest of us ?
With erotic photography moving toward the explicit, the fetish, and pornography retreating into harder and harder sex, is there still a line between the two ? An interesting movement on the internet is represented by Simple Nudes, which :
Basically it means nude art without anything much added. If the images are artistic, they are only so to a degree that does not interfere with the beauty of the model. And if the images are erotic, they are so as an undertone, not the main purpose, and they are not so to a degree that that overwhelms the experience of the beauty of the model.
This is actually a movement that I try to be a part of, but it's somewhat odd that someone had to start something like that. Nudity is the most natural state, in my opinion, and yet we have to codify it and define it and give deeper meanings to it...
We'll continue that tomorrow I guess... |
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