Hidden Eros

Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.

(La Rochefoucauld, Reflections, 1665)

We advocate freedom, against any kind of censorship.
And yet today, sex being everywhere, legitimized, we feel we are missing something. There is in fact a strange paradox about eroticism: the need to have a prohibition, in order to transgress it.
“Is sex dirty? Only when it’s being done right“, Woody Allen joked, summarizing how much the orthodox or religious restrictions have actually fostered and given a richer flavor to sexual congresses.

An enlightening example might come from the terrible best-selling books of the past few years: we might wonder why nowadays erotic literature seems to be produced by people who can’t write, for people who can’t read.
The great masterpieces of erotica appeared when it was forbidden to write about sex. Both the author (often a well-known and otherwise respectable writer) and the editor were forced to act in anonimity and, if exposed, could be subjected to a harsh sentence. Dangerous, outlaw literature: it wasn’t written with the purpose of seeling hundreds of thousands of copies, but rather to be sold under the counter to the few who could understand it.
Thus, paradoxically, such a strict censorship granted that the publishing of an erotic work corresponded to a poetic, authorial urgency. Risqué literature, in many cases, represented a necessary and unsuppressible artistic expression. The crossing of a boundary, of a barrier.

Given the current flat landscape, we inevitably look with curiosity (if not a bit of nostalgia) at those times when eroticism had to be carefully concealed from prying eyes.
An original variation of this “sunken” collective imagination are those erotic objects which in France (where they were paricularly popular) are called à système, “with a device”.
They consisted in obscene representations hidden behind a harmless appearance, and could only be seen by those who knew the mechanism, the secret move, the trick to uncover them.

Some twenty years ago in Chinese restaurants in Italy, liquor at the end of the meal was served in peculiar little cups that had a convex glass base: when the cup was full, the optic distorsion was corrected by the liquid and it was possible to admire, on the bottom, the picture of a half-undressed lady, who became invisible once again as the cup was emptied.
The concept behind the ancient objets à système was the same: simple objects, sometimes common home furnishings, disguising the owners’ unmentionable fantasies from potential guests coming to the house.

The most basic kind of objects à système had false bottoms and secret compartments. Indecent images could be hidden in all sorts of accessories, from snuffboxes to walking canes, from fake cheese cartons to double paintings.

Ivory box, the lid shows a double scene. XIX Century.

Gioco del domino, in avorio intarsiato alla maniera dei marinai, con tavole erotiche.

Inlaid domino game, in the manner of sailors decorations, with erotic plates.

Walking stick knob handle.

Paintings with hidden pictures.

A young woman reads a book: if the painting is opened, her improper fantasies are visualized.

Other, slightly more elaborate objects presented a double face: a change of perspective was needed in order to discover their indecent side. A classic example from the beginning of the XX Century are ceramic sculptures or ashtrays which, when turned upside down, held some surprises.

The monk, a classic erotic figure, is hiding a secret inside the wicker basket on his shoulders.

Double-faced pendant: the woman’s legs can be closed, and on the back a romantic flowered heart takes shape.

Then there were objects featuring a hinge, a device that had to be activated, or removable parts. Some statuettes, such as the beautiful bronzes created by Bergman‘s famous Austrian forgery, were perfect art nouveau decorations, but still concealed a spicy little secret.

The top half of this polichrome ceramic figurine is actually a lid which, once removed, shows the Marquise crouching in the position called de la pisseuse, popularized by an infamous Rembrandt etching.

Snuffbox, sailor’s sculpture. Here the mechanism causes the soldier’s hat to “fall down”, revealing the true nature of the gallant scene.

Meerschaum pipe. Upon inserting a pipe cleaner into the chamber, a small lever is activated.

29b

In time, the artisans came up with ever more creative ideas.
For instance there were decorations composed of two separate figurines, showing a beautiful and chaste young girl in the company of a gallant faun. But it was enough to alter the charachters’ position in order to see the continuation of their affair, and to verify how successful the satyr’s seduction had been.

Even more elaborate ruses were devised to disguise these images. The following picture shows a fake book (end of XVIII Century) hiding a secret chest. The spring keys on the bottom allow for the unrolling of a strip which contained seven small risqué scenes, appearing through the oval frame.

The following figures were a real classic, and with many variations ended up printed on pillboxes, dishes, matchstick boxes, and several other utensiles. At first glance, they don’t look obscene at all; their secret becomes only clear when they are turned uspide down, and the bottom part of the drawing is covered with one hand (you can try it yourself below).

43b

The medals in the picture below were particularly ingenious. Once again, the images on both sides showed nothing suspicious if examied by the non-initiated. But flipping the medal on its axis caused them to “combine” like the frames of a movie, and to appear together. The results can be easily imagined.

In closing, here are some surprising Chinese fans.
In his book La magia dei libri (presented in NYC in 2015), Mariano Tomatis reports several historical examples of “hacked books”, which were specifically modified to achieve a conjuring effect. These magic fans work in similar fashion: they sport innocent pictures on both sides, provided that the fan is opened as usual from left to right. But if the fan is opened from right to left, the show gets kinky.

A feature of these artisan creations, as opposed to classic erotic art, was a constant element of irony. The very concept of these objects appears to be mocking and sardonic.
Think about it: anyone could keep some pornographic works locked up in a safe. But to exhibit them in the living room, before unsuspecting relatives and acquaintances? To put them in plain view, under the nose of your mother-in-law or the visiting reverend?

That was evidently the ultimate pleasure, a real triumph of dissimulation.

Playing card with nude watermark, made visible by placing it in front of a candle.

Such objects have suffered the same loss of meaning afflicting libertine literature; as there is no real reason to produce them anymore, they have become little more than a collector’s curiosity.
And nonetheless they can still help us to better understand the paradox we talked about in the beginning: the objets à système manage to give us a thrill only in the presence of a taboo, only as long as they are supposed to remain under cover, just like the sexual ghosts which according to Freud lie behind the innocuous images we see in our dreams.
Should we interpret these objects as symbols of bourgeois duplicity, of the urge to maintain at all cost an honorable facade? Were they instead an attempt to rebel against the established rules?
And furthermore, are we sure that sexual transgression is so revolutionary as it appears, or does it actually play a conservative social role in regard to the Norm?

Eventually, making sex acceptable and bringing it to light – depriving it of its part of darkness – will not cause our desire to vanish, as desire can always find its way. It probably won’t even impoverish art or literature, which will (hopefully) build new symbolic imagery suitable for a “public domain” eroticism.
The only aspect which is on the brink of extinction is precisely that good old idea of transgression, which also animated these naughty knick-knacks. Taking a look at contemporary conventions on alternative sexuality, it would seem that the fall of taboos has already occurred. In the absence of prohibitions, with no more rules to break, sex is losing its venomous and dangerous character; and yet it is conquering unprecedented serenity and new possibilities of exploration.

So what about us?
We would like to have our cake and eat it too: we advocate freedom, against any kind of censorship, but secretely keep longing for that exquisite frisson of danger and sin.

The images in this article are for the most part taken from Jean-Pierre Bourgeron, Les Masques d’Eros – Les objets érotiques de collection à système (1985, Editions de l’amateur, Paris).
The extraordinary collection of erotic objects assembled by André Pieyre de Mandiargues (French poet and writer close to the Surrealist movement) was the focus of a short film by Walerian Borowczyk: Une collection particulière (1973) can be seen on YouTube.

Balthus’ adolescents

Art should comfort the disturbed,
and disturb the comfortable.

(Cesar A. Cruz)

Until January 31 2016 it is possible to visit the Balthus retrospective in Rome, which is divided in two parts, a most comprehensive exhibit being held at the Scuderie del Quirinale, and a second part in Villa Medici focusing on the artist’s creative process and giving access to the rooms the painter renovated and lived in during his 16 years as director of the Academy of France.

In many ways Balthus still remains an enigmatic figure, so unswervingly antimodernist to keep the viewer at distance: his gaze, always directed to the Renaissance (Piero della Francesca above all), is matched by a constant and meticulous research on materials, on painting itself before anything else. Closely examined, his canvas shows an immense plastic work on paint, applied in uneven and rugged strokes, but just taking a few steps back this proves to be functional to the creation of that peculiar fine dust always dancing within the light of his compositions, that kind of glow cloaking figures and objects and giving them a magical realist aura.

Even if the exhibit has the merit of retracing the whole spectrum of influences, experimentations and different themes explored by the painter in his long (but not too prolific) career, the paintings he created from the 30s to the 50s are unquestionably the ones that still remain in the collective unconscious. The fact that Balthus is not widely known and exhibited can be ascribed to the artist’s predilection for adolescent subjects, often half-undressed young girls depicted in provocative poses. In Villa Medici are presented some of the infamous polaroids which caused a German exhibit to close last year, with accusations of displaying pedophilic material.

The question of Balthus’ alleged pedophilia — latent or not — is one that could only arise in our days, when the taboo regarding children has grown to unprecedented proportions; and it closely resembles the shadows cast over Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, guilty of taking several photographs of little girls (pictures that Balthus, by the way, adored).

But if some of his paintings cause such an uproar even today, it may be because they bring up something subtly unsettling. Is this eroticism, pornography, or something else?

Trying to find a perfect definition separating eroticism from pornography is an outdated exercise. More interesting is perhaps the distinction made by Angela Carter (a great writer actively involved in the feminist cause) in her essay The Sadeian Woman, namely the contrast between reactionary pornography and “moral” (revolutionary) pornography.

Carter states that pornography, despite being obscene, is largely reactionary: it is devised to comfort and strenghten stereotypes, reducing sexuality to the level of those crude graffiti on the walls of public lavatories. This representation of intercourse inevitably ends up being just an encounter of penises and vaginas, or their analogues/substitutes. What is left out, is the complexity behind every sexual expression, which is actually influenced by economics, society and politics, even if we have a hard time acknowledging it. Being poor, for intance, can limit or deny your chance for a sophisticated eroticism: if you live in a cold climate and cannot afford heating, then you will have to give up on nudity; if you have many children, you will be denied intimacy, and so on. The way we make love is a product of circumstances, social class, culture and several other factors.

Thus, the “moral” pornographer is one who does not back up in the face of complexity, who does not try to reduce it but rather to stress it, even to the detriment of his work’s erotic appeal; in doing so, he distances himself from the pornographic cliché that would want sexual intercourse to be just an abstract encounter of genitals, a shallow and meaningless icon; in giving back to sexuality its real depth, this pornographer creates true literature, true art. This attitude is clearly subversive, in that it calls into question biases and archetypes that our culture — according to Carter — secretely inoculates in our minds (for instance the idea of the Male with an erect sex ready to invade and conquer, the Female still bleeding every month on the account of the primordial castration that turned her genitals passive and “receptive”, etc.).

In this sense, Carter sees in Sade not a simple satyr but a satirist, the pioneer of this pornography aiming to expose the logic and stereoptypes used by power to mollify and dull people’s minds: in the Marquis’ universe, in fact, sex is always an act of abuse, and it is used as a narrative to depict a social horizon just as violent and immoral. Sade’s vision is certainly not tender towards the powerful, who are described as revolting monsters devoted by their own nature to crime, nor towards the weak, who are guilty of not rebelling to their own condition. When confronting his pornographic production with all that came before and after him, particularly erotic novels about young girls’ sexual education, it is clear how much Sade actually used it in a subversive and taunting way.

Pierre Klossowksi, Balthus’ brother, was one of Sade’s greatest commentators, yet we probably should not assign too much relevance to this connection; the painter’s frirendship with Antonin Artaud could be more enlightening.

Beyond their actual collaborations (in 1934 Artaud reviewed Balthus’ first personal exhibit, and the following year the painter designed costumes and sets for the staging of The Cenci), Artaudian theories can guide us in reading more deeply into Balthus’ most controversial works.

Cruelty was for Artaud a destructive and at the same time enlivening force, essential requisite for theater or for any other kind of art: cruelty against the spectator, who should be violently shaken from his certainties, and cruelty against the artist himself, in order to break every mask and to open the dizzying abyss hidden behind them.

Balthus’ Uncanny is not as striking, but it moves along the same lines. He sees in his adolscents, portrayed in bare bourgeois interiors and severe geometric perspectives, a subversive force — a cruel force, because it referes to raw instincts, to that primordial animalism society is always trying to deny.

Prepuberal and puberal age are the moments in which, once we leave the innocence of childhood behind, the conflict between Nature and Culture enters our everyday life. The child for the first time runs into prohibitions that should, in the mind of adults, create a cut from our wild past: his most undignified instincts must be suppressed by the rules of good behavior. And, almost as if they wanted to irritate the spectators, Balthus’ teenagers do anything but sit properly: they read in unbecoming positions, they precariously lean against the armchair with their thighs open, incorrigibly provocative despite their blank faces.

But is this a sexual provocation, or just ironic disobedience? Balthus never grew tired of repeating that malice lies only in the eyes of the beholder. Because adolescents are still pure, even if for a short time, and with their unaffectedness they reveal the adults inhibitions.

This is the subtle and elegant subversive vein of his paintings, the true reason for which they still cause such an uproar: Balthus’ cruelty lies in showing us a golden age, our own purest soul, the one that gets killed each time an adolescent becomes an adult. His aesthetic and poetic admiration is focused on this glimpse of freedom, on that instant in which the lost diamond of youth sparkles.

And if we want at all costs to find a trace of eroticism in his paintings, it will have to be some kind of “revolutionary” eroticism, like we said earlier, as it insinuates under our skin a complexity of emotions, and definitely not reassuring ones. Because with their cheeky ambiguity Balthus’ girls always leave us with the unpleasant feeling that we might be the real perverts.

Drone Boning

Avrete forse sentito dire che un nuovo genere di pornografia ha recentemente fatto la sua comparsa su internet: il film porno realizzato con i droni.
Da un paio di mesi, infatti, è diventato virale il breve video intitolato Drone Boning, che ha fatto discutere i media americani di questioni legate alla privacy, ma anche dell’annoso problema dello svecchiamento del porno (in altre parole, “e poi cos’altro si inventeranno ancora?”).

Il concept di Drone Boning è molto semplice: le immagini di incantevoli paesaggi riprese dagli APR (aeromobili a pilotaggio remoto) disvelano di tanto in tanto delle coppie intente in congiungimenti sessuali en plein air. Ripresi da altezze vertiginose, fino a risultare minuscole figurine perse all’interno della natura, questi corpi possono davvero eccitare lo spettatore? Bisogna aspettarsi un nuovo feticismo? Avrà mercato questo nuovo sottogenere? A quando una nuova categoria di YouPorn dedicata ai droni?

Peccato che, com’è intuibile, Drone Boning non sia affatto un porno, ma un video musicale del duo Taggart and Rosewood, realizzato dalla società di video pubblicitari Ghost+Cow Films. L’idea di farlo passare per un autentico filmato erotico è chiaramente una trovata di marketing per amplificarne la risonanza.

La voglia di scherzare e divertirsi è evidente sin dal titolo (che si potrebbe tradurre “Trombate col drone”), e viene ribadita nelle scanzonate interviste rilasciate dai due registi in seguito al polverone, in cui dichiarano candidamente che l’idea di base era soltanto filmare dei “semplici, bei paesaggi, con dentro persone che scopano“. Come ha sottolineato il comico Stephen Colbert, “be’, questo era il progetto originale di Dio per la Terra“.

Eppure, al di là dello spirito goliardico dei realizzatori, il video è tecnicamente ineccepibile e possiede perfino una sua peculiare poesia: grazie a una splendida fotografia e alla straniante e ipnotica colonna sonora, Drone Boning ci interroga ancora una volta, beffardamente, sui confini fra arte e pornografia.

Death 2.0

Considerations about death in the age of social media

Take a look at the above Top Chart.
Blackbird is a Beatles song originally published in the 1968 White Album.
Although Paul McCartney wrote it 46 years ago, last week the song topped the iTunes charts in the Rock genre. Why?
The answer is below:

Italian articles about “daddy Blackbird”.

Chris Picco lives in California: he lost his wife Ashley, who died prematurely giving birth to litle Lennon. On November 12 a video appeared on YouTube showing Chris singing Blackbird before the incubator where his son was struggling for life; the child died just four days after birth.
The video went immediately viral, soon reaching 15 million views, bouncing from social neworks to newspapers and viceversa, with great pariticipation and a flood of sad emoticons and moving comments. This is just the last episode in a new, yet already well-established tendency of public exhibitions of suffering and mourning.

Brittany Maynard (1984-2014), terminally ill, activist for assisted suicide rights.

A recent article by Kelly Conaboy, adressing the phenomenon of tragic videos and stories going viral, uses the expression grief porn: these videos may well be a heart-felt, sincere display to begin with, but they soon become pure entertainment, giving the spectator an immediate and quick adrenaline rush; once the “emotional masturbation” is over, once our little tear has been shed, once we’ve commented and shared, we feel better. We close the browser, and go on with our lives.
If the tabloid genre of grief porn, Conaboy stresses out, is as old as sexual scandals, until now it was only limited to particularly tragic, violent, extraordinary death accounts; the internet, on the other hand, makes it possible to expose common people’s private lives. These videos could be part of a widespread exhibitionism/vouyeurism dynamics, in which the will to show off one’s pain is matched by the users’ desire to watch it — and to press the “Like” button in order to prove their sensitivity.

During the Twentieth Century we witnessed a collective removal of death. So much has been written about this removal process, there is no need to dwell on it. The real question is: is something changing? What do these new phenomenons tell us about our own relationship with death? How is it evolving?

If death as a real, first-hand experience still remains a sorrowful mystery, a forbidden territory encompassing both the reality of the dead body (the true “scandal”) and the elaboration of grief (not so strictly coded as it once was), on the other hand we are witnessing an unprecedented pervasiveness of the representation of death.
Beyond the issues of commercialization and banalization, we have to face an ever more unhibited presence of death images in today’s society: from skulls decorating bags, pins, Tshirts as well as showing up in modern art Museums, to death becoming a communication/marketing/propaganda tool (terrorist beheadings, drug cartels execution videos, immense websites archiving raw footage of accidents, homicides and suicides). All of this is not death, it must be stressed, it’s just its image, its simulacrum — which doesn’t even require a narrative.
Referring to it as “death pornography” does make sense, given that these representations rely on what is in fact the most exciting element of classic pornography: it is what Baudrillard called hyper-reality, an image so realistic that it surpasses, or takes over, reality. (In porn videos, think of viewpoints which would be “impossibile” during the actual intercourse, think of HD resolution bringing out every detail of the actors’ skin, of 3D porn, etc. — this is also what happens with death in simulacrum.)

Damien Hirst poses with his famous For the love of God.

We can now die a million times, on the tip of a cursor, with every click starting a video or loading a picture. This omnipresence of representations of death, on the other hand, might not be a sign of an obscenity-bound, degenerated society, but rather a natural reaction and metabolization of last century’s removal. The mystery of death still untouched, its obscenity is coming apart (the obscene being brought back “on scene”) until it becomes an everyday image. To continue the parallelism with pornography, director Davide Ferrario (in his investigative book Guardami. Storie dal porno) wrote that witnessing a sexual intercourse, as a guest on an adult movie set, was not in the least exciting for him; but as soon as he looked into the camera viewfinder, everything changed and the scene became more real. Even some war photographers report that explosions do not seem real until they observe them through the camera lens. It is the dominion of the image taking over concrete objects, and if in Baudrillard’s writings this historic shift was described in somewhat apocalyptic colors, today we understand that this state of things — the imaginary overcoming reality — might not be the end of our society, but rather a new beginning.

Little by little our society is heading towards a global and globalized mythology. Intelligence — at least the classic idea of a “genius”, an individual achieving extraordinary deeds on his own — is becoming an outdated myth, giving way to the super-conscience of the web-organism, able to work more and more effectively than the single individual. There will be less and less monuments to epic characters, if this tendency proves durable, less and less heroes. More and more innovations and discoveries will be ascribable to virtual communities (but is there a virtuality opposing reality any more?), and the merit of great achievements will be distributed among a net of individuals.

In much the same way, death is changing in weight and significance.
Preservation and devotion to human remains, although both well-established traditions, are already being challenged by a new and widespread recycling sensitivity, and the idea of ecological reuse basically means taking back decomposition — abhorred for centuries by Western societies, and denied through the use of caskets preventing the body from touching the dirt. The Resurrection of the flesh, the main theological motivation behind an “intact” burial, is giving way to the idea of composting, which is a noble concept in its own right. Within this new perspective, respect for the bodies is not exclusively expressed through devotion, fear towards the bones or the inviolability of the corpse; it gives importance to the body’s usefulness, whether through organ transplant, donation to science, or reduction of its pollution impact. Destroying the body is no longer considered a taboo, but rather an act of generosity towards the environment.

At the same time, this new approach to death is slowly getting rid of the old mysterious, serious and dark overtones. Macabre fashion, black tourism or the many death-related entertainment and cultural events, trying to raise awareness about these topics (for example the London Month of the Dead, or the seminal Death Salon), are ways of dealing once and for all with the removal. Even humor and kitsch, as offensive as they might seem, are necessary steps in this transformation.

Human ashes pressed into a vinyl.

Human ashes turned into a diamond.

And so the internet is daily suggesting a kind of death which is no longer censored or denied, but openly faced, up to the point of turning it into a show.
In respect to the dizzying success of images of suffering and death, the word voyeurism is often used. But can we call it voyeurism when the stranger’s gaze is desired and requested by the “victims” themselves, for instance by terminally ill people trying to raise awareness about their condition, to leave a testimony or simply to give a voice to their pain?

Jennifer Johnson, madre di due bambini e malata terminale, nell'ultimo video prima della morte.

Jennifer Johnson, mother of two children, in her last video before she died (2012).

The exhibition of difficult personal experiences is a part of our society’s new expedient to deal with death and suffering: these are no longer taboos to be hidden and elaborated in the private sphere, but feelings worth sharing with the entire world. If at the time of big extended families, in the first decades of ‘900, grief was “spread” over the whole community, and in the second half of the century it fell back on the individual, who was lacking the instruments to elaborate it, now online community is offering a new way of allocation of suffering. Condoleances and affectionate messages can be received by perfect strangers, in a new paradigm of “superficial” but industrious solidarity.
Chris Picco, “daddy Blackbird”, certainly does not complain about the attention the video brought to him, because the users generosity made it possible for him to raise the $ 200.000 needed to cover medical expenses.

I could never articulate how much your support and your strength and your prayers and your emails and your Facebook messages and your text messages—I don’t know how any of you got my number, but there’s been a lot of me just, ‘Uh, okay, thank you, um.’ I didn’t bother going into the whole, ‘I don’t know who you are, but thank you.’ I just—it has meant so much to me, and so when I say ‘thank you’ I know exactly what you mean.

On the other end of the PC screen is the secret curiosity of those who watch images of death. Those who share these videos, more or less openly enjoying them. Is it really just “emotional masturbation”? Is this some obscene and morbid curiosity?
I personally don’t think there is such a thing as a morbid — that is, pathological — curiosity. Curiosity is an evolutionary tool which enables us to elaborate strategies for the future, and therefore it is always sane and healthy. If we examine voyeurism under this light, it turns out to be a real resource. When cars slow down at the sight of an accident, it’s not always in hope of seeing blood and guts: our brain is urging us to slow down because it needs time to investigate the situation, to elaborate what has happened, to understand what went on there. That’s exactly what the brain is wired to do — inferring data which might prove useful in the future, should we find ourselves in a similar situation.

Accordingly, the history of theater, literature and cinema is full to the brim with tragedy, violence, disasters: the interest lies in finding out how the characters will react to the difficulties they come about. We still need the Hero’s Journey, we still need to discover how he’s going to overcome the tests he finds along the way, and to see how he will solve his problems. As kids, we carefully studied our parents to learn the appropriate response to every situation, and as adults our mind keeps amassing as much detail as possible, to try and control future obstacles.

By identifying with the father playing a sweet song to his dying son, we are confronting ourselves. “What is this man feeling? What would I do in such a predicament? Would I be able to overcome terror in this same way? Would this strategy work for me?”
The construction of our online persona comes only at a later time, when the video is over. Then it becomes important to prove to our contacts and followers that we are humane and sympathetic, that we were deeply moved, and so begins the second phase, with all the expressions of grief, the (real or fake) tears, the participation. This new paradigma, this modern kind of mourning, requires little time and resources, but it could work better than we think (again, see the success of Mr. Picco’s fund-raising campaing). And this sharing of grief is only possible on the account of the initial curiosity that made us click on that video.

And what about those people who dig even deeper into the dark side of the web, with its endless supply of images of death, and watch extremly gruesome videos?
The fundamental stimulus behind watching a video of a man who gets, let’s say, eaten alive by a crocodile, is probably the very same. At a basic lavel, we are always trying to acquire useful data to respond to the unknown, and curiosity is our weapon of defense and adaptation against an uncertain future; a future in which, almost certainly, we won’t have to fight off an alligator, but we’ll certainly need to face suffering, death and the unexpected.
The most shocking videos sometimes lure us with the promise of showing what is normally forbidden or censored: how does the human body react to a fall from a ten story building? Watching the video, it’s as if we too are falling by proxy; just like, by proxy but in a more acceptable context, we can indentify with the tragic reaction of a father watching his child die.

A weightlifter is lifting a barbell. Suddenly his knee snaps and collapses. We scream, jump off the seat, feel a stab of pain. We divert our eyes, then look again, and each time we go over the scene in our mind it’s like we are feeling a little bit of the athlete’s pain (a famous neurologic study on empathy proved that, in part, this is exactly what is going on). This is not masochism, nor a strange need to be upset: anticipation of pain is considered one of the common psychological strategies to prepare for it, and watching a video is a cheap and harmless solution.

In my opinion, the curiosity of those who watch images of suffering and death should not be stigmatized as “sick”, as it is a completely natural instinct. And this very curiosity is behind the ever growing offer of such images, as it is also what allows suffering people to stage their own condition.

The real innovations of these last few years have been the legitimization of death as a public representation, and the collectivization of the experience of grief and mourning — according to the spirit of open confrontation and sharing, typical of social media. These features will probably get more and more evident on Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms: even today, many people suffering from an illness are choosing to post real-time updates on their therapy, in fact opening the curtain over a reality (disease and hospital care) which has been concealed for a long time.

There’ll be the breaking of the ancient Western Code / Your private life will suddenly explode, sang Leonard Cohen in The Future. The great poet’s views expressed in the song are pessimistic, if not apocalyptc, as you would expect from a Twentieth century exponent. Yet it looks like this voluntary (and partial) sacrifice of the private sphere is proving to be an effective way to fix the general lack of grief elaboration codes. We talk ever more frequently about death and disease, and until now it seems that the benefits of this dialogue are exceeding the possible stress from over-exposure (see this article).

What prompted me to write this post is the feeling, albeit vague and uncertain, that a transition is taking place, before our eyes, even if it’s still all too cloudy to be clearly outlined; and of course, such a transformation cannot be immune to excesses, which inevitably affect any crisis. We shall see if these unprecedented, still partly unconscious strategies prove to be an adequate solution in dealing with our ultimate fate, or if they are bound to take other, different forms.
But something is definitely changing.

La bambina nella scatola

Dietro ogni cosa bella
c’è stato qualche tipo di dolore.
(Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet)

La storia di Irina Ionesco e di sua figlia Eva suscita scandalo da quarant’anni, ed è certamente un caso unico nel panorama dell’arte contemporanea per le implicazioni etiche e morali che lo accompagnano.

Irina Ionesco, nata a Parigi da padre violinista e madre trapezista, viene abbandonata all’età di quattro anni. Spedita in Romania, paese da cui provenivano i genitori, Irina viene cresciuta dalla nonna e dagli zii nell’ambiente del circo. Nonostante sognasse di diventare ballerina, a causa del suo fisico asciutto ed elastico verrà indirizzata verso l’antica arte del contorsionismo. Dai 15 ai 22 anni gira l’Europa, l’Africa e il Medio Oriente con il circo; durante il suo spettacolo si esibisce con due serpenti boa, e più tardi dichiarerà: “ero diventata schiava di quei serpenti, e alla fine ne ho avuto abbastanza”.

Durante una convalescenza a causa di un incidente di danza a Damasco, Irina comincia a disegnare e a dipingere; abbandonato il circo, viaggia per qualche anno con un ricco giocatore d’azzardo iraniano che la copre di gioielli e abiti lussuosi, prima di studiare arte a Parigi. Poi, ecco da una parte l’incontro fortuito con la fotografia (l’artista belga Corneille le regala una reflex nel 1964), e con gli scritti sulfurei e trasgressivi di Georges Bataille dall’altra.

Le sue fotografie, che inizialmente ritraggono amiche e amici agghindati con gli abiti che Irina aveva nel suo stesso guardaroba e fotografati al lume di candela, conoscono un immediato successo fin dalla prima esposizione. Già da questi primi scatti sono evidenti quegli elementi che attraverseranno tutta l’opera della fotografa: l’erotismo feticistico, i costumi di scena ricercati e barocchi, le pose teatrali, le collane di perle, e i dettagli gotici (teschi, corredi funebri, composizioni floreali).

Ma le fotografie davvero controverse di Irina Ionesco non sono queste. Dal 1969 in poi, Irina decide di fotografare sua figlia Eva, di appena 4 anni, nei medesimi contesti in cui fotografa le modelle adulte. Cioè nuda, in pose da femme fatale, e agghindata soltanto con quegli accessori che avrebbero dovuto renderla un’icona dell’erotismo.

Siamo negli anni ’70, un’epoca in cui i tabù sessuali sembrano cadere ad uno ad uno, e chiaramente il lavoro di Irina si iscrive in questo contesto storico specifico; ciononostante le foto creano un grosso scandalo – che ovviamente porta fama e successo alla fotografa. La critica discute animatamente se si tratti di arte o di pornografia, e anzi per qualcuno le fotografie proiettano un’ombra ancora più inquietante, quella dell’istigazione alla pedofilia.

Ma in tutto questo, cosa prova la piccola Eva Ionesco? È in grado, data la sua tenera età, di comprendere appieno ciò che le sta accadendo?

Mia madre mi ha fatto posare per foto al limite della pornografia fin dall’età di 4 anni. Tre volte a settimana, per dieci anni. Ed era un ricatto: se non posavo, non avevo diritto ad avere dei bei vestiti nuovi. E soprattutto non potevo vedere mia mamma. Mia madre non mi ha mai allevata; il nostro unico rapporto, erano le foto.

Eva Ionesco diviene ben presto una piccola star: nell’ottobre del 1976, all’età di 11 anni, viene pubblicato un servizio su di lei sul numero italiano di Playboy. È la più giovane modella mai apparsa nuda sulle pagine della rivista. Seguono alcuni ingaggi come attrice (il primo nell’Inquilino del Terzo Piano di Polanski), fra i quali spicca il suo ruolo nel film “maledetto” di Pier Giuseppe Murgia, Maladolescenza, del 1977. Il film racconta la scoperta, da parte di tre adolescenti, della sessualità e degli istinti crudeli ad essa collegati, in un ambiente naturale e privo di sovrastrutture (in un chiaro riferimento al Signore delle Mosche); le due attrici protagoniste di 11 anni e il loro compagno di 17, nel film sono impegnati in scene di sesso simulato e mostrati mentre si dedicano a torture reciproche e contro gli animali. Il film non manca di una sua poesia, per quanto efferata e disturbante, ma nei decenni successivi viene ritirato, censurato, rieditato e infine condannato definitivamente per pedopornografia nel 2010 da una corte olandese.

Da tutta questa serie di attività di modella a sfondo erotico, decise e volute dalla madre, Eva riuscirà a liberarsi proprio nel 1977, quando Irina perde l’affidamento della figlia. Eppure l’ombra di quelle fotografie perseguita Eva ancora oggi. E se madre e figlia non hanno mai avuto un vero rapporto, per anni si sono parlate soltanto per interposti avvocati.

Non vuole rendermi le stampe e i negativi. Continua a vendere un numero enorme di quelle fotografie. In Giappone si trova ancora un sacco di roba, libri, CD erotici. La gente crede che Irina Ionesco significhi soltanto foto vintage con una piccola principessa che viene spogliata. Ma io me ne frego dei reggicalze! Bisogna dire le cose come stanno: voglio far proibire le foto in cui mi si vedono il sesso e l’ano.

I processi giudiziari, per mezzo dei quali Eva ha cercato di riappropriarsi dei propri diritti e di farsi riconsegnare dalla madre gli scatti più espliciti, hanno avuto un amaro epilogo nel 2012: il tribunale le ha riconosciuto soltanto parte delle richieste, e ha condannato Irina a versare 10.000 euro di danni e interessi per sfruttamento dell’immagine e della vita privata della figlia. Ma le foto sono ancora di proprietà della madre.

Nel 2010 Eva ha cercato di liberarsi dei fantasmi della sua infanzia curando la regia di My Little Princess, un film in parte autobiografico in cui il personaggio della madre è affidato all’interpretazione di Isabelle Huppert e quello della bambina a una sorprendente Anamaria Vartolomei. Nel film, l’arte fotografica è vista come un’attività senza dubbio pericolosa:

Isabelle Huppert carica la macchina fotografica come un’arma. L’immagine rinchiude, rende il personaggio muto. Fotografarmi, significava mettermi in una scatola: dirmi “sii bella e stai zitta”.

E in un’altra intervista, Eva rincara la dose:

Spogliare qualcuno, fotografarlo, rispogliarlo, rifotografarlo, non è violenza? Accompagnata da parole gentili, naturalmente: sei magnifica, sublime, meravigliosa, ti adoro. […] Volevo raccontare una persona senza coscienza né barriere, dispotica e narcisa. Una persona che non vede. Fotografa, ma non vede.

Il valore artistico dell’opera di Irina Ionesco non è mai stato messo in discussione, nemmeno dalla figlia, che le riconosce un’incontestabile qualità di stile; sono le implicazioni etiche che fanno ancora discutere a distanza di decenni. Le fotografie della Ionesco ci interrogano sui rapporti fra l’arte e la vita in modo estremo e viscerale. Esistono infatti innumerevoli esempi di opere sublimi, la cui realizzazione da parte dell’artista ha comportato o implicato la sofferenza altrui; ma fino a dove è lecito spingersi?

Forse oggi ciò che rimane è una dicotomia fra due poli contrapposti: da una parte le splendide immagini, provocanti e sensuali proprio per il fatto che ci mettono a disagio, come dovrebbe sempre fare l’erotismo vero – un mondo immaginario, quello di Irina Ionesco, che secondo Mandiargues “appartiene a un ambito che non possiamo conoscere, se non attraverso la nostra fede in fragili ricordi”.
Dall’altra, la ben più prosaica e triste vicenda umana di una madre fredda, chiusa nel suo narcisismo, che rende sua figlia una bambina-manichino, oggetto di sofisticate fantasie barocche in un’età in cui forse la piccola avrebbe preferito giocare con i compagni (cosa che Irina le ha sempre proibito).

L’innegabile fascino delle fotografie della Ionesco sarà quindi per sempre incrinato da questo conflitto insanabile – la consapevolezza che dietro quegli scatti si nascondesse un abuso; eppure questo stesso conflitto le rende particolarmente inquietanti e ambigue, addirittura al di là delle intenzioni originali dell’autrice, in quanto stimolano nello spettatore emozioni contrastanti che poche altre opere erotiche sono in grado di veicolare.

Irina compirà 78 anni a settembre, e continua ad esporre e a lavorare. Eva Ionesco oggi ha 48 anni, e un figlio: non è davvero sorprendente che non gli abbia mai scattato una foto.

Le interviste a cui fa riferimento l’articolo sono consultabili qui e qui.

Daikichi Amano

Daikichi Amano è un fotografo nato in Giappone nel 1973; dopo gli studi in America, torna in patria e si dedica inizialmente alla moda. Stancatosi delle foto patinate commissionategli dalle riviste, decide di concentrarsi su progetti propri e comincia fin da subito a scandagliare il lato meno solare della cultura nipponica: il sesso e il feticismo.

I primi scatti di questa nuova piega nel suo lavoro sono dedicati al cosiddetto octopus fetish (di cui avevamo già parlato brevemente in questo post): belle modelle nude vengono ricoperte di piovre e polpi, che talvolta sottolineano con i tentacoli le loro forme, ma più spesso creano una sorta di grottesco e mostruoso ibrido. Le immagini sono al tempo stesso repellenti e sensuali, quasi archetipiche, e il raffinato uso della luce e della composizione fa risaltare questa strana commistione di umano e di animale, sottolineando la sessualità allusa dalla scivolosa e umida pelle dei cefalopodi.

Poi gli animali cambiano, si moltiplicano, proliferano sui corpi delle modelle che sembrano sempre più offerte in sacrificio alla natura: anguille, rospi, rane, insetti, vermi ricoprono le donne di Amano, in composizioni sempre più astratte e surreali, ne violano gli orifizi, prendono possesso della loro fisicità.

Con il passare del tempo, la fotografia di Daikichi Amano rivela sempre di più il valore mitologico che la sottende. Le donne-uccello ricoperte di piume ricordano esplicitamente l’immaginario fantastico nipponico, ricco di demoni e fantasmi dalle forme terribili e inusitate, e la fusione fra uomo e natura (tanto vagheggiata nella filosofia e nella tradizione giapponese) assume i contorni dell’incubo e del surreale.

Mai volgare, anche quando si spinge fino nei territori tabù della rappresentazione esplicita dei genitali femminili, Amano è un autore sensibile alle atmosfere e fedele alla sua visione: non è un caso che, così pare, alla fine di ogni sessione fotografica egli decida di mangiare – assieme alle modelle e alla troupe – tutti gli animali già morti utilizzati per lo scatto, siano essi polpi o insetti o lucertole, secondo una sorta di rituale di ringraziamento per aver prestato la loro “anima” alla creazione della fotografia. Il mito è il vero fulcro dell’arte di Amano.

Le sue fotografie sono indubbiamente estreme, e hanno creato fin da subito scalpore (soprattutto in Occidente), riesumando l’ormai trito dibattito sui confini fra arte e pornografia: qual è la linea di separazione fra i due ambiti? È ovviamente impossibile definire oggettivamente il concetto di arte, ma di sicuro la pornografia non contempla affatto il simbolico e la stratificazione mitologica (quando si apre a questi aspetti, diviene erotismo), e quindi ci sentiremmo di escludere le fotografie di Amano dall’ambito della pura sexploitation. Andrebbe considerata anche la barriera culturale fra Occidente e Giappone, che pare insuperabile per molti critici, soprattutto nei riguardi di determinati risvolti della sessualità. Ma nelle fotografie di Amano è contenuta tutta l’epica del Sol Levante, l’ideale della compenetrazione con la natura, il concetto di identità in mutamento, l’amore per il grottesco e per il perturbante, la continua seduzione che la morte esercita sulla vita e viceversa.

Le sue immagini possono sicuramente turbare e perfino disgustarci, ma di certo è difficile licenziarle come semplice, squallida pornografia.

Ecco il sito ufficiale di Daikichi Amano.

Octopus Fetish

Tra i feticismi sessuali più anomali, argomento che tratteremo periodicamente su Bizzarro Bazar, uno dei meno conosciuti è il cosiddetto octopus fetish, vale a dire il feticismo relativo alle piovre. Come si sa, ogni forma di feticismo è a suo modo altamente estetizzante, e questa particolare declinazione parafiliaca non fa eccezione.

Proveniente dal Giappone, la patria per antonomasia di ogni feticismo estremo, il feticismo dei polpi ha origini illustri e artisticamente rilevanti: basti pensare che alcuni lo farebbero risalire addirittura al maestro Katsushika Hokusai, il “vecchio pazzo per la pittura” autore della celeberrima Grande Onda e delle 36 vedute del monte Fuji. Il famoso pittore di ukiyo-e (un tipo di stampa artistica su blocchi di legno) attorno al 1820 dipinse un quadro erotico intitolato Il sogno della moglie del pescatore, che ritrae una donna nuda sensualmente avviluppata dai tentacoli di due polpi giganteschi.

A dire il vero, la rappresentazione di unioni sessuali fra donne e pesci era piuttosto diffusa fin dal XVII secolo, ma questa celebrata opera di shunga (arte erotica giapponese) è spesso citata come uno dei primissimi esempi di erotismo tentacolare, un genere oggi comunemente diffuso in tutto il Giappone – tanto da essere divenuto un tema classico di molti hentai (film di animazione erotici).

Ma se nei cartoni animati pornografici ad aggredire le belle protagoniste – più o meno consenzienti – sono solitamente dei mostri dagli innumerevoli tentacoli, l’idea originale del semplice polpo ha continuato a sopravvivere negli scatti di alcuni fotografi ed assume i contorni più netti di uno specifico feticismo.