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February 22, 2004
This is cheesecake.
Cheesecake is basically pinup for the locker room boys. Unablogger works within, and develops Playboy cheescake. The cheescake plays on the old 'peering through a keyhole', with its thrill of voyeurism, the desire to look, and the anxiety of being seen to be looking.
Only now, with the internet, this voyeurism is out in the open. Still the old line marking a taboo remains.This is:
"...the line that separates "innocent" erotic art, quaintly known as cheesecake, from pornography. Cheesecake is a secondary representation of sexual beauty, like the "myths" described by Roland Barthes: it represents the desirable without directly arousing desire, which appears only through its mimetic detour. In contrast, pornography alludes directly to sexual activity... it displays such activity in detail. Its effect... is mimetically to induce the spectator to equivalent activity."
Where's the subversion with cheescake? Cheescake is associated with entertainment, the culture industry, Hollywood stars, identification and the calculations of instrumental reason to stimulate consumption. Sex fuels Hollywood and cheesecake stars sell products.
Hollywood cheesecake was calculated to provide access to the sacred. The modern culture industry fused the sacred and the everyday using mass media (radio, film, the press, advertising --eg. all the big-titted Hollywood stars atop the cover or on p. 3 of the Murdoch tabloids). So we have the spectacle, myth and the expression of a violent unconscious---the irrational. The sacred is reconnected to everyday reality by the culture industry.
This is art:
Hans Bellmer, The Doll,1935
It has a critical edge.
True, an old reading of Bellmer is that the work is sadistically masculine. Yet give me Hans Bellmer anyday:
Doll, 1938
Why?
Bellmer captures the reality of what often happens to women in a patriarchal society.
With Bellmer's dolls we enter a world of sexual repression, anxiety, and obsession. It is a world of tortured women. In a culture where women are a sex object for men's desires, their bodies becomes a series of phallic projections in which their body parts --eg. breasts, the mouth, the vagina---become objects of sexual fetishes filled violence.
Bellmer
My online inbox regularly contains an invite from various porn sites to 'drill her' or to treat the female body as only meat. In this context Bellmer's images can be interpreted as a critique of a porn-obssessed society that evades discussion of porn in everyday life:
Bellmer
This prespective of the truth content art as a critique of society gives an alternative reading Bellmer to the conventional one of Bellmer being a twisted and sick individual.
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Wow, i have finally found a site on Hans that I like. He is one of my favorite artists and has inspired me with my work. Thank you for not protraying him as a sick sadistic person.