Phobia, Philias, Fetish

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us"

My next body of work will focus on male and female bodies, 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. This will create an illusion of a landscape, but I hope to maintain some of the erotic suggestion with the curves of their bodies. 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. 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 in any manor considering their size permits them to essentially do whatever they want to me, and I will always be physically powerless to stop it. The reasons I have chosen largely muscled men is to highly 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. This man I no longer have access to, I had tried many times to make photographs of him, 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 project is about the male/female power relationships, and is personal to the relationship I had with a man who resembled these giant, muscled, body builder type bodies. Considering I was never able to create an object from images of him, I am 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 manipulate or control him in order to create a record that I had once had access to such a beautiful creature. 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 string, and I want to create an object which embodies what I remember of that body which I no longer have access to. My desire to create these images is not about a lingering desire to control the body that I lost, or a sexual desire for it, but is about the fear and safety. 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 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 only want it from him still.

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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 he had together is no longer a sensation which I consider when trying to create new images.

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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 the heart break, I only have further fetishized this type of male body because I yearn to feel safe and protected. 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 women, ISIS sex slaves, rape punishments for theft 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. These strong men are something that I am afraid of, but also something that I am obsessed with for the security of my own body. By making these abstract, grotesque, yet eroticized-object images of these men, I am soothing myself from the loss of that safe body that I lost, 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.

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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 theme 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 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. I think 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, 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.

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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 self portraits. 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 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 this video of dramatically expelling this material, 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 asethic which I am able to capture with the cattle 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 as 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

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us"

___ His beauty has in a big way, anniljhated me. I project what I loved about him onto every muscular man I meet, and hope that they are as secretly sweet as he turned out to be during the course of our romance. I have totally fetishized the pectoral muscles, and even have become slightly obsessed with gay men. For example, most of the images I follow on instagram are from "Beefcakes" and "Stuff Muffin" type pages, because that type of body reminds me of him, and I think I must imagine it conforms me to know that there are other men about there that look like him, even if those guys are strictly not interested in my gender. grief sex mirror