The Muff Manifesto: Part One

'Nowadays vagina envy has been joined by pudenda power. One famous expression of it is Courbet's 1866 spread-eagle crotch shot, The Origin of the World [above], which scandalized not only because it displayed a flash of pink, but because it portrayed the female sex in its full hairy glory, rather than classicised and bare. Then there's real life: John Ruskin, who on his wedding night fled at the sight of his wife's pubic hair. This was before photography (and Courbet's painting), and the only female nudes he'd seen had been in art, and carefully tonsured. He thought his wife was grossly deformed, a freak.'

From Pudenda Agenda by Jerry Saltz (Artnet Magazine Features).


Reading:

The Sadeian Woman - Angela Carter

The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction - Michel Foucault

The History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure - Michel Foucault

The History of Sexuality Vol. 3: Care of the Self - Michel Foucault

Viewing:

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) - d. Luis Bunuel

Teratomania: Part Two

Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) - Leo, 2006

'I am as interested in the emotional outcomes of such transformations as I am in the conceptual or ethical. Sometimes I worry that my work isn’t ‘cool’ enough; it is warm, cute, emotive, melodramatic even. Nowhere is this more evident than in my drawings...These drawings explore one of the central themes of my practice; our relationship with the things that we create, in this case my helper creatures. There is a combination of innocence, trust and vulnerability in the children that I find quite apposite as a way to express our relationship with much of the new technologies that now impact on our world and our bodies. I love the way that they seem to get on so well together, but it also worries me a little.'

Patricia Piccinini (from Nature's Little Helpers)

Reading:

Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism - Elizabeth Grosz

Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures - Elizabeth Grosz

Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely - Elizabeth Grosz

Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies - Elizabeth Grosz

Viewing:

The Fly (1986) - d. David Cronenberg

Teratomania: Part One

Patricia Piccinini (b. 1965) - Undivided, 2005


'Some things, once done, are not easily undone. We might recognise later that we should not have done them in the first place, however undoing them is not so easy. Like an egg, which once broken cannot be unbroken, when something is created, it is difficult to contain. This stands as much for a work of art as it does for a genetically modified creature. Anyone who thinks that they can maintain control of the things that they create is fooling themselves. Whether it is genetically modified canola, the cane toad, a work on the secondary market or an image on the internet, once the thing leaves our hands all we can do is watch.'

Patricia Piccinini (from Nature's Little Helpers)

Essays and images are available at: http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/

When The Void Becomes Eloquent

Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

'We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.'

Roland Barthes (1915-1980), The Death of the Author (1968) [published in Image-Music-Text, 1977]

Admirers of Barthes' essay should also read: What is an Author? - Michel Foucault (1969)


Reading:

The Phenomenology of Perception - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The World of Percpetion - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Viewing:

King Kong (1933) - d. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack