A Clinical Study of Pornography
[In The Atrocity Exhibition] Traven explores what most people would regard as pretty frightening pornographic imagery; he explores with the kind of eye of a forensic pathologist. He treats sexual desire as if it was something stretched out on an autopsy table; he takes a woman’s body and dismantles it – not literally, but almost literally – and constructs a kit which is literally that. I mean inside of a suitcase, as you show in the film, there is a set of the key elements that we respond to when we become sexually aroused – a pair of latex breasts, nipples, detachable pubic hair…
J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Jonathan Weiss in 2006, commentary track on The Atrocity Exhibition (2000; film directed by Weiss).
And then you have Wim Delvoye. (Remember, Delvoye’s Gothic Amalgamation of Familiar Icons was one of Gilding’s favorites.)
Delvoye’s series, SexRays, takes pornography to a level of science many, including the author of this article, find disturbing. Is it the sex, is it the clinical, autopsy-like connection? Gilding, however, finds it pretty fucking (teehee) cool — no surprise there.
Delvoye convinced
friends to paint
themselves with barium
(the liquid chemical
element used as an
X-ray radiocontrast agent for imaging the human gastrointestinal tract) and then be ‘photographed’ using X-Ray machines having sex. Simple idea, complex images.
Link: Wim Delvoye | SexRays
Via: Ballardian
eldritch00 said,
May 21, 2009 at 10:27 am
Thanks for the link to the specific part of Delvoye’s site with the SexRays. Thanks too for A Gothic Amalgamation of Familiar Icons–I saw bits of that before but completely forgot about it until now. And now I know who’s responsible for them as well.
Gilding said,
May 21, 2009 at 4:12 pm
You’re quite welcome. Everytime I see a work and wonder who its by I’m always shocked and at the same time expectant that its his work. His meticulousness is about the one constant in his stylistic works because each series is something new and different. It makes him almost impossible to immediately peg, but once you know its him you’re like “Of course!” ~<3