Phobia, Philias, Fetish

In the context of art history, eroticism was the dominant theme in primitive art, but it primarily focused on fertility, highlighting the vulva, phallus, and breasts. There was a spirituality around it, and they served ritualistic functions for the tribes or communities. Ritual and fertility worship is not a part of art works today, and are not something that I am concerned with. However, the concerns of the body today are concerns of safety, violence, and sexual violence. I am concerned with this issue of comfort, fear, safety, and violence and I want to address this using these strong male bodies. Since a dramatic heart break, I only have further fetishized strong and masculine male bodies because I yearn to feel protected, and the body that I lost was exceptionally strong. The political state of the world is very unstable, and especially for women all around the world. I can barely read the news because there will be some sickening headline of hasidic rape assembly lines which exploit young children, ISIS sex slaves, rape as punishments for crimes of male family members in Saudi Arabia, and police officers raping women they pull over for a tail light. I can not make work about these instances, because I find that kind of sadness debilitating and I simply can not digest the information and maintain a reasonable level of anxiety or sadness. Alternately, I want to focus on strong male bodies, and the short comings of my own physical and spiritual body. Strong and bulbously shaped men are something that I am afraid of, but also something that I am obsessed with for the security of my own body. This next body of work will focus on male and female bodies (my own), depicted in photographs and simultaneously, in video recordings of the photographs being produced. My subject will be heavily muscled men, bulbous in shape, with grotesque protrusions and with statures which greatly exceed my own. I will photograph these men using extremely bright and saturated light, which will in certain areas, wash away detail and recognizability from the figure. The intention here is to further warp the familiarity of the bodies, and alter the body builder association. The images will all be tightly framed on certain muscles, allowing the muscles to produce shadows on its own body using the artificial light. The presence off hair, or lack of will serve of creature an unsavory texture at such a close range. In addition to the still images, another important aspect of the project will be the video documentation of the photos being created. The production aspect of this project is important for the way in which the entire project will be viewed. I am beginning this work by talking to men online and and on dating websites which have the massive bodies I spoke of. After contacting them and asking to meet in person, I am suggesting that they allow me to photograph them in the nude, or partially so. We are than meeting in an apartment, alone, and I video the process of the two of us cooperating in making the images. I do this for two reasons: 1, I do not have the finances to hire an assistant, or someone to be there for safety reasons. In this setting, I am essentially expecting that they will honor the unspoken social contract of not killing me or overtaking me, considering their size permits them to essentially do whatever they want to me. The reasons I have chosen largely muscled men is to highlight our difference is size, their power over me, and as a personal fetishization of a man that was once in my life, whose body I no longer have access to. I had tried many times to make photographs of this man, but he insisted that I was "objectifying" him, and he was against it. He maintained that I could only have access to his body after being given permission, and that the photographs would detach him from our relationship. My relationship with this man is over, and I am still clinging to that body. This series is about the dominance in our relationship. He was a man who resembled these giant, muscled, body builder types. He never allowed me to do a photoshoot in order to create an object from images of him, so I am now trying to use these other bodies as a stand in to create the images of him which I was forbidden to make. In that relationship, he was very dominant and I was unable to convince him that the images were anything but an objectification of his body and beauty. It has been years since this relationship ended, and until now, I could not consider doing something like this, as the bodies reminded me of him and it was painful. At this point, I no longer feel that instant sting, and I want to create an object which embodies what I remember of being with him. My desire to create these images is not sexual in nature, but is a reference to the insecurity I feel having lost this strong figure in my life. In the presence of that man, and in the context of that relationship, I was the most calm I'd ever been, and was free of great anxiety because I felt totally safe from any other external threat. It is very anti feminist, because now I am looking for someone to surrender to, or to dominate my life in some way where I can rest my fears on them and take comfort in knowing that they will have the control over me, and I will not have to protect myself. In the context of how that relationship ended, it is ironic, because he left because I would not surrender, and I would not let him make choices for me, and now, that is all I really want, but, I still only want it from him.

I could not make this work before because he was still too real to me, but now, I can not really remember what it was like. I can think of him, and I remember him, but there are no feelings attached to that remembrance anymore. Now, I feel the urge to some how capture what is left of that memory before I can't even remember anymore. I want this work to be a kind of representational object of how I saw, him, or at least how he thinks I saw him. When I was still in love with him, I could not do this project because I still felt I had to honor his wishes not to objectify his body. Even using the bodies of other people, I still felt guilty for admitting that I had fetishize him, and that his body was something that I was maybe irrationally drawn to. That loyalty to honor what we had together is no longer a sensation which I consider when trying to create new images. By making these abstract, grotesque, yet eroticized-object images of these men, I am soothing myself from the loss of that safety, and by including the videos of me in a potentially dangerous situation with these guys, I am further reminding myself that I am not safe, and that they are not the men that have sworn to protect me. I am some where in-between still.

In terms of concept, technically, I think this whole project is really a strange take on the self portrait because the work is more about me in relationship to these bodies than about the bodies themselves. Self portraiture is the only realm of photography I have ever really felt was valuable for me, but as I dealt with critique of my work, the reoccurring comment is that I was too typically female and typically beautiful for the images to be transgressive. In that moment, I attempted to pair myself with a large masculine creature, the brahman, but the critique than became centered around the myth of Europa, animal/female partnership, mythology, and was again not about interpersonal power dynamics. Trying to move away from cattle, I started looking for a more powerful and exotic creature to juxtapose my own delicate form with, and I think that the most appropriately exotic creature will be these abnormally muscled men. An important addition to the work is this documentation of the image making, partly to show the threat of safety, and also the fact that I am volunteering to put myself in this situation. Post-heart break, I began to think masochistically in regard to my ex-lover. I kind of have a fantasy that he kills me, although I do not think about him physically killing me, I just kind of sigh and wish that he had. However, I do not actually hope one of these men hurts me and I get the opportunity to catch it on camera. But all women basically go through life hoping and assuming that the men we come in contact with will honor the social contract of not killing us, because they certainly are capable of it.

In combination with my fetishization of physically strong men, there is another aspect of my broken heart that I would like to deal with using a more literally definded self portrait. As I read about the grotesque body, and these physical protrusions, like the bulky muscles, I've thought about how I can use myself as a representation of the grotesque body. As I mentioned before, it has been a challenge for me to try and use my own body for this because of my feminine and soft features. In reading "The Grotesque Image of The Body" from Bakhtin on Rabelais, there is a focus on the grotesque body in two parts, the "upper stratum" and "lower stratum". From Rabelias's perspective, the grotesque lies in the lower stratum. For example, excrement, vomit, mucus, urine, and birth. However, I am not interesting in making work that involves any of these specific acts. But I am very interested in the image of the "gaping mouth" as a symbol for what goes in, and what comes out. I want to make a video shot and looped forwards and backwards of my own gaping mouth with a kind of goo, or mucus like substance that appears to be coming out of my body, but will ultimately all go back in via the rewind of the tape. A notable issue in my failed relationships is that I am very much not soft enough in my demeanor, or feminine, or sweet. After being broken up with for these specific reasons, my ex-lover would continue to emphasize how beautiful I was- only after having pointed out how very not beautiful he believed I am on the "inside". A song by Barrington Levy came on at this moment where the lyrics read "Your pretty looks can't control me- Your pretty looks is deceiving, girl" and then he kind of laughed, and I kind of cried. Since this experience, I have made a forceful effort to curb my quick, harsh, and abrupt behavior- but who knows if that has been effective. I want to create this video of dramatically expelling an internal substance, in order to purge myself of these bad traits, which will then again be re-consumed. My hope is that by removing my face with the exception of my mouth, chin, and neck, and including what will appear to be the act of vomiting some gooey substance, I will be able to include myself in the work and maintain the grotesque asethetic which I am able to capture with the cattle and the less feminine subjects. I am going to mimic, to some degree, the aesthetic of Marilyn Minters video of the women licking the beads. What I would like to avoid, which is a heavy feature of this work, is the strong eroticization of the mouth. My work always has an eroticism to it, and that is not to be avoided entirely, but I do not want the work to be sorely sexual. I want to focus on this obscene act of expelling something from inside the belly, and then taking it all back down again. Even writing that now, it sounds pornographic, but according to some, porn is inherently obscene, whether or not it does serve to arouse.