[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> In a message dated 06/27/2000 3:00:20 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> << Kathy Acker's treatments of obscenity might interest you; they hold more
> interest
> for me than the rather stale patriarchal guilt/desire of, say, Miller.
> >>
>
> I think it was Foucault who pointed out that pornography arises with along
> with sexual repression. Before that you get eroticism. How can we reclaim the
> erotic?
Interesting you should say that--Acker was interesting for me in her moment
because she claimed the right for women to be obscene, but unfortunately that
right isn't very enjoyable. And yes, I think that eroticism--that is, fun sex w/o
punishment and guilt--is highly revolutionary, and probably always will be as
long as property and the selling of one's time for money alienates people from
their own bodies and those of the people they love.
I'm currently working on a long series of tar paintings (asphaltum on plywood) of
forest-as-field (that is, not pictorialized but the complex visual field of the
forest as you walk through it--I take slides, project them, do rough drawings
from this, and then kind of carve the drawings out of the ply with the blacks)
that are now beginning to incorporate forest elementals. They're erotic figures,
male and female, with these leafy heads. They're depicted on 2 ft by 8ft sheets
of ply--tall and narrow--the other work is on panels ranging from 4 ft by 8 ft to
12 ft by 8 ft. All freestanding, doublesided. Makes a sort of maze.
What's interesting to me is that all these figures are unconscious--that is,
sleeping, whatever. They all are sort of flung down. That's how they occur, it's
not really a conscious choice. Also interesting is that they are not --how to
say-- offering themselves as erotic, they are erotic incidentally. It seems to
make some difference. Encountered on their own terms, they are not objectified.
Imagining a sexual world in which women are not hated and punished is not easy,
but it is becoming increasingly possible. Young writers (have you read "In the
Drink"?) are doing, without a lot of fanfare, works in which women do live
broadly physical lives (not only do they have sex without being thrown under
trains, they also fart, get indigestion, and eat things in nonpathological ways.)
I have hope, and am having much fun doing this figurative work right now.
AK
