Police Open Probe Against Obscene Play
Police in Hamburg are investigating a Spanish theater group for displays of pornographic sex and bestiality in a controversial play which premiered in the city last week.
This controversy was reported by DW 24.08.2004:
The play "XXX" by Catalan theater group La Fura dels Baus is based on a 1795 story, "Philosophy of the Bedroom" by French playwright the Marquis de Sade. Notorious for its uninhibited display of naked lust and violence, the multimedia performance is billed as a modern theatrical response to the porn industry.
But its scenes depicting graphic incest, rape and pornography proved too much to bear to theater-goers in Hamburg last week.
Violence and bestiality
Following reports in Germany' mass-selling tabloid Bild on Friday that the play included a video sequence showing a woman having sex with a donkey, Hamburg police opened a probe against the Spanish group for the "spread of violence and bestiality."
A police officer called in to investigate said, "Bestiality is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison."
A separate report said an outraged woman in the audience alerted police after witnessing scenes of urination and simulated rape and oral sex during the play's opening night. The play is also said to have encouraged two audience members to come on stage and masturbate to make it more interactive.
A separate report said an outraged woman in the audience alerted police after witnessing scenes of urination and simulated rape and oral sex during the play's opening night. The play is also said to have encouraged two audience members to come on stage and masturbate to make it more interactive.
Many theater-goers who went to see the 105-minute performance at Hamburg's Kampnagel Theater are said to have walked out in disgust halfway through. Others asked for a ticket refund.
Freedom of expression?
"First we'll probe whether the video is covered by the right to freedom of expression," a spokeswoman for Hamburg's state prosecutor said. She added that no charges had been filed relating to the play. "We're investigating in general against all responsible for the performance," she added.
It's not the first time that the Spanish group has run into trouble for the controversial play. Two years ago it created a furor when it opened in Frankfurt. Last year the Spanish production met with protests and police investigations in London.
Meanwhile the Kampnagel Theater in Hamburg, famous for its experimental performances, has announced it has dropped the offensive video from the performance.
"Apart from that, the play will continue unchanged," a spokesman for the theater told news agency DPA. "We reckon that the investigation will be dropped because 'XXX' is an entire artwork," he added.
Hamburg's Cultural Ministry has thrown its weight behind the theater. "It's an important and correct play, it plays with the boundaries between pornography and art," spokesman Björn Marzahn told DPA.
The ministry, he said, welcomed the fact that the Kampnagel Theater had reacted so promptly to the criticism and excised out the controversial video from the play.
The Guardian reported on Fura dels Baus in 2007 with an article headlined:
'We use the body as theatre'
Laura Barnett (Thu 19 Jul 2007) writes:
La Fura dels Baus certainly know how to make an entrance. The last time the Barcelona theatre collective came to Britain, they brought a hardcore theatrical sex show called XXX. It sparked a tabloid storm and an investigation by Scotland Yard into whether "criminal activities", aka sex acts, were committed on stage (they were not).Nudity is pretty much La Fura's calling card: in XXX, a rendering of the writings of the Marquis de Sade featuring re-enactments of sex, torture and mutilation, the actors were rarely clothed. Its run in London and the Edinburgh Festival in 2003 prompted irate tabloid headlines - "Stop this filth," stormed one - along with predominantly scathing reviews and the involvement of the vice squad.
What about crowd participation? Audience plants at XXX rushed the stage to indulge in "sex acts", and spectators at La Fura's 1997 production Manes in London's Docklands were pelted with plastic chickens and drenched with buckets of water.
Sex Acts?
An XXX review - Edinburgh Fringe Festival - says:
From the very start XXX hands out both a full responsibility and an invitation to participate. As the audience enters one finds out that by sending a text message via mobile phone to a given number, his or her message appears projected on the stage. La Fura cleverly, and to set the mood, turn a passive moment into something that involves the audience. The show is a free adaptation of the Marquis De Sade's Philosophy of the Boudoir, and as such it is not surprising that it involves a lot of sex, and a lot of 'uncommon' practices.
Philosophy in the Bedroom
The plot is rather simple: we observe as the young and innocent Eugenia is taught a number of lessons in depravity by a group of three libertines, Lula, a glamorous Madame/porn star, her incestuous brother Giovanni, and the aggressive Dolmance. The lessons go from how to pleasure a woman orally, to sadism and ultimately raping her own mother.
However the real shock of the piece is the way it portrays sex as an experience that has become extremely mediated.
This is slightly drilled into the audience as we are confronted with pornography clips, cyber-sex, a menu of sex toys and sex machines, and ultimately a live cam-chat with a girl somewhere in a strip club in Barcelona.
De Sade's text is equally revolutionary and in addition to it we hear statements such as 'Plastic is much better than flesh' or 'Time and body no longer exist'. Formally the performance is equally mediated as a camera is moved around stage filming the actors. Theatre becomes cinema as camera angles impossible to archive due to the proscenium arch are projected on stage. We constantly see screens upon screens, or behind screens. The effect of seeing the actors' actions superimposed, on stage and on screen is somewhat dazzling at first, but ultimately works in favour of what La Fura is trying to say, or rather, shouting out at us. There is of course a great sense of humour in the piece, as it does not portray sex as something necessarily obscure and dirty but as having delicate and complex balance. The two best examples of this 'toilet humour' are a conversation one of the four characters has with his disappointed penis, projected on stage but appearing with a talking mouth; and the presentation of the 'Globalised Cunt' that comes with it's own travel case and it's own incorporated light. This light-hearted mood is broken on several occasions shortly after it settles on stage, making XXX a true rollercoaster. Moreover the show does not stop at the proscenium arch, it rolls into the auditorium to see if any adventurous audience members want a ride. There is a 'pheromone experiment' in which the audience are sprayed with pheromones and the lights turned off, whilst a crew members passes row after row recording with night-vision what people do. When the lights come back on, one of the characters is so disappointed in the audience's inability to spontaneously start an orgy that he starts asking for volunteers. Without giving too much away all I will say is that several spectators do get naked during the performance, one even receiving a fellatio from one of the characters. But don't be unnecessarily alarmed, not all you see in XXX is absolutely real. No, there is no live sex on stage and no, there probably were no pheromones. There are more important things to think and debate with yourself about, than whether it is all real or not. It is a piece with a sharp philosophical and political message, and it does not bite its tongue. The rhythm is frenetic and the images stunning. As you may guess, this is not a show for kids, the prude or fainthearted, but will certainly entertain anyone willing to take up a challenge. Whether you decide to remain in your seat or not, XXX makes you question your moral standards and preconceptions as well as question what kind of a society produces this kind of mediated 'sex'.
Image from an article accessed from Word and Image - Illustrating phallic worship: uses of material objects and the production of sexual knowledge in eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science - by Jana Funke, Kate Fisher, Jen Grove, and Rebecca Langlands.
When dialogue begins, propaganda ends!
Phalluses and/or fallaciesDe Sade's strategies and tactics in the text Philosophy in Bedroom is to intersperse a number of philosophical dialogues with a number of pornographic episodes. This is "clickbait" before "clickbait", and where the attempt to expose the fallacies of normative social values, using textual images of phalluses and orifices, depends on the Baudelairean "Hypocrite lecteur", or "Hypocrite reader", addressed as "You!" (surely, and therefore, pointing to "us"), juggling the erotic and philospohical in an "Enlightenment sleepover".
Who was this De Sade?
According to the Wikipedia article De Sade was:
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814), was a French nobleman, revolutionary politician, philosopher and writer, famous for his libertine sexuality. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. In his lifetime some of these were published under his own name while others, which Sade denied having written, appeared anonymously.
Sade is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence (particularly against women and children), suffering, criminality and blasphemy against Christianity. He became infamous for numerous rapes and sexual abuse of young men, women and children. He claimed to be a proponent of absolute freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law. The words sadism and sadist are derived from his name.
Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and an insane asylum for about 32 years of his life: 11 years in Paris (10 of which were spent in the Bastille), a month in the Conciergerie, two years in a fortress, a year in Madelonnettes Convent, three years in Bicêtre Asylum, a year in Sainte-Pélagie Prison, and 12 years in the Charenton Asylum. During the French Revolution, he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. Many of his works were written in prison.
There continues to be a fascination with Sade among scholars and in popular culture. Prolific French intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault published studies of him. On the other hand the French hedonist philosopher Michel Onfray has attacked this cult, writing that "It is intellectually bizarre to make Sade a hero." There have also been numerous film adaptions of his work, the most notable being Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, an adaptation of his infamous book, The 120 Days of Sodom.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the 1975 period horror art film[a] directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film is a loose adaptation of the book The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade, set during World War II, and was Pasolini's final film, being released posthumously three weeks after his murder. The film focuses on four wealthy, corrupt Italian libertines, in the time of the fascist Republic of Salò (1943–1945). The libertines kidnap eighteen teenagers and subject them to four months of extreme violence, murder, sadism and sexual and mental torture. The film explores the themes of political corruption, consumerism, capitalism, nihilism, morality, abuse of power, social darwinism, sadism, sexuality and fascism.
The story is in four segments, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy: the Anteinferno, the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Excrement, and the Circle of Blood. The film also contains frequent references to and several discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche's 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morality, Ezra Pound's poem The Cantos, and Marcel Proust's novel sequence In Search of Lost Time.
The Wikipedia article on this film cites Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote of the film:
"Roland Barthes noted that in spite of all its objectionable elements (he pointed out that any film that renders Sade real and fascism unreal is doubly wrong), this film should be defended because it 'refuses to allow us to redeem ourselves.' It's certainly the film in which Pasolini's protest against the modern world finds its most extreme and anguished expression. Very hard to take, but in its own way an essential work.
Stephen Barber writes:
"The core of Salò is the anus, and its narrative drive pivots around the act of sodomy. No scene of a sex act has been confirmed in the film until one of the libertines has approached its participants and sodomized the figure committing the act. The filmic material of Salò is one that compacts celluloid and feces, in Pasolini's desire to burst the limits of cinema, via the anally resonant eye of the film lens."
Barber also notes that Pasolini's film reduces the extent of the storytelling sequences present in de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom so that they "possess equal status" with the sadistic acts committed by the libertines.
Man Ray's "Monument to D.A.F. de Sade" has been chosen for the Penguin Classic Book Cover
In Legacies of Sade: Man Ray’s Imaginary Portraits, an article posted by Samm Deighan in a Feature Article for Diabolique Magazine February 25, 2018, he writes: In 1933, for Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution (Surrealism in the service of the revolution), Man Ray created Monument à D.A.F. de Sade after viewing the original manuscript of Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage (The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage). While this is obviously not a portrait of Sade, to which Man Ray would later turn his attention, it captures the philosophical spirit of Les 120 Journées de Sodome: explicit sexuality, blasphemy, and an implied preoccupation with anal sex.
This simple, elegant image—a photograph of a woman’s ass framed by an upside-down cross—would go on to appear in slightly different versions, such as this (see below) version which I believe is from 1935, and would later be used as a cover for a print edition of Sade’s novel.
The contemporary accommodation of the work of De Sade, the erstwhile rapist and pedophile, is due in part to the Surrealists championing his "revolutionary" philosophy. Samm Deighan begins the aforementioned article with a quote from André Breton:
“Sade is surrealist in sadism.”The legacy of the Marquis de Sade can be felt strongly in the 20th century, largely because of the efforts of the French Surrealists in the ‘20s and ‘30s: writers and artists like Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, and Georges Bataille, among many others. For the Surrealists, Sade was seen as a revolutionary, a figure who tread new ground in literary form and daring, but also a radical champion of personal freedom, sexuality, and transgression. In Surrealism, History and Revolution, Simon Baker writes, “The alternative construction of Sade as a revolutionary hero began with the earliest twentieth-century accounts of his life and work, but it can be summed up by Paul Eduard’s 1926 essay title, ‘D.A.F. de Sade, fantastic and revolutionary writer.’”
Baker continued, “Between the texts in which first Apollinaire and later Breton, Eluard, and Bataille tied Sade to his revolutionary destiny, there were always attempts to represent him visually. […] The most notable significant early twentieth century images, however, are the imaginary portraits produced by Man Ray from 1936 onwards, which take the principle of the archive as portrait to produce Sade from the perspective of surrealism.” The Philadelphia-born Man Ray (née Emmanuel Radnitzky) was an integral member of this group and spent much of his life in France; his drawings, prints, and photographs inspired by Sade are some of the most striking visual reminders of the 18th century writer’s impact on the Surrealists.
Scene, Machine, Writing
"What a lovely group!" La Durande exclaims, seeing Juliette "occupied by four thieves from Ancona. The Sadian group is often a pictorial or sculptural object: the discourse captures the figures of debauchery not only as arranged, architectured, but above all as frozen, framed, lighted; it treats them as tableau vivants. this form of theater has been little studied, doubtless because no one does it anymore. However, must we be reminded that for a long time the tableau vivant was a bourgeois entertainment, analagous to the charade? as a child, the present author on several occasions attended, at pious and provincial charity bazaars, performances of grand tableau vivants - Sleeping Beauty, for example, he did not know that this social game is of the same fantasmatic essence as the Sadian tableau; perhaps he came to understand that later by observing that the filmic photogram is opposed to film itself because of a split which is not created by its having been extracted (one immobilizes and publishes a scene taken from a great film), but, one might say, by its having been perverted: the tableau vivant, despite the apparently total character of the figuration, is a fetish object (to immobilize, to light, to frame, means to cut up), whereas film, as function, is an hysterical activity (the cinema does not consist in animating images, the opposition between photography and film is not that of the fixed and the mobile image, cinema consists not in figuring, but in a system's being made to function).
Now, despite the predominance of tableau, this split exists in Sadian text and, it appears, for the same purposes. For the "group" which is in fact a photogram of debauchery, is contrasted here and there with a moving scene. The vocabulary charged with denoting this commotion within the group (which virtually changes its nature, philosophically) is an extensive one (to execute, to continue, to vary, to break up, to disarrange). We know that this functioning scene is nothing but a machine without subject, since there is even an automatic ticking ("Minski approaches the hitched-up creature and fondles his buttocks, bites them, and all the women instantly form six ranks").
Up front . . .
Soft and hardcore porn "clickbait" and De Sade's "Philosophy in the Bedroom"
Philosophy in the Bedroom (La philosophie dans le boudoir) is a 1795 book by the Marquis de Sade written in the form of a dramatic dialogue.
Though initially considered a work of pornography, the book has come to be considered a socio-political drama. Set in a bedroom, the two lead characters make the argument that the only moral system that reinforces the recent political revolution is libertinism, and that if the people of France fail to adopt the libertine philosophy, France will be destined to return to a monarchic state.
In the chapter titled "Fifth Dialogue", there is a lengthy section where the character Chevalier reads a philosophical pamphlet titled "Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish To Become Republicans".
The pamphlet clearly represents Sade's philosophy on religion and morality, a philosophy he passionately hopes the citizens of France will embrace and codify into the laws of their new republican government.
Continually throughout the work, Sade makes the argument that one must embrace atheism, reject society's beliefs about pleasure and pain, and further makes his argument that if any crime is committed while seeking pleasure, it cannot be condemned.
One relevant question for readers of Philosophy in the Bedroom is what is the punishment and what is the reward? If De Sade's philosophy is what drives the reader on, then the sexually explicit, hardcore fantasy episodes, could represent a temporary escape from philosophy into either a forbidden zone of freedom, or a torture chamber? These zones are places where empathy is battered, and roles flip from one end of the spectrum to the other. For the reader looking for the frisson of sexual titillation, the extreme, and hardcore nature of the pornographic episodes may function as a sort of "clickbait" technique, to lighten the effect of the heavy imposition of philosophical pronouncements, in encouraging readers in the expectation of further erotic and/or violent diversions.
This is a British poster for the 1970 film Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (original titles: De Sade 70 and Marquis de Sade's 'Philosophy in the Boudoir'). This was a softcore film adaptation and modern-day update of the Marquis de Sade's book directed by Spanish filmmaker Jesús Franco.
While the graphic imagery in the poster has a harsh black and white effect that emphasises punishment and violence, the film possesses a nuanced sense of the possible boundaries between pleasure and pain. The director is skilled in creating a cinematic space where the use of colour and composition create the kinds of ambiguity upon which softcore pornography depends. It suggests and intimates within acceptable parameters rather than present things happening in explicit terms.
De Sade is by contrast "hardcore". The characters Dolmancé and Madame de Saint-Ange start off by giving Eugénie their own brand of sex education, explaining the biological facts and declaring that physical pleasure is a far more important motive for sex than that of reproduction. Both characters explain that she will not be able to feel "true pleasure" without pain. Then they eagerly get down to the practical lessons, with Le Chevalier joining them in the fourth act and swiftly helping to take away Eugénie's virginity.
Eugénie is instructed on the pleasures of various sexual practices and she proves to be a fast learner. As is usually the case in Sade's work, the characters are all bisexual, and sodomy is the preferred activity of all concerned, especially Dolmancé, who prefers male sexual partners and will not have anything other than anal intercourse with females. Madame de Saint-Ange and her younger brother, the Chevalier, also have sex with one another, and boast of doing so on a regular basis. Their incest — and all manner of other sexual activity and taboos, such as sodomy, adultery and homosexuality — is justified by Dolmancé in a series of energetic arguments that ultimately boil down to "if it feels good, do it".
. . . and backside!
When it comes to the many book cover designs for De Sade's writings it is usually the case that an example of a risqué artwork will do the job. Something "up front" but at the same time "art", a Picasso maybe, or a Courbet. Maybe something Rococo. The Surrealists provide an excellent quarry for the excavation of such images.
10 things to know about Egon Schiele
No 4 is: "He confronted taboo subjects"
By the early 1910s, Schiele’s work had become an obsessive exploration of the human body. He never shied away from candidly depicting genitalia — female genitalia as well as his own — or from treating subjects that were taboo for the time, such as masturbation or sex between women.
These pictures, however, go far beyond conventional eroticism. Schiele’s nakedness is starved, desperate, mortal, and stripped of all societal and artistic convention.
Egon Schiele (1890-1918)
Rückenakt mit orangefarbenen Strümpfen, 1918.
Sold for $373,500 16 May 2018 Christie’s New York
There you have it! Art as soft porn! Suitable as a "cover" for hard core lectures amoreuses!
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
— Hypocrite reader! — My twin! — My brother!
Up front . . . A Museum of Sex?
The opposite of sex?
“Better than most, perhaps. But talent is in the balls”. Salvador Dali
So said Dali of the artist Leonor Fini. Her work often inverted gender roles, as in “Woman Seated on a Naked Man” (1942).
Fini also illustrated about 50 books in her life, choosing authors and titles that fit her own interests, including “Satyricon” and works by Jean Genet and Charles Baudelaire. Some of her best-known works in this area are her drawings for a 1944 edition of the Marquis de Sade’s “Juliette.”
A retrospective of Fini's work was curated at the Museum of Sex, New York in September 2018.
Sex, Surrealism and de Sade: Mysogyny?
In the New york Times review of this Fini exhibition by Daniel McDermon (Nov. 6, 2018), the reviewer writes:
The artist Leonor Fini worked tirelessly throughout most of the 20th century, often alongside universally acknowledged masters like Max Ernst, André Breton and George Balanchine.
Fini also had three works in the landmark 1936 exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by the museum’s founder, Alfred H. Barr Jr. But the museum owns none of her work, and she remains little known in the United States.
Fini, who died in 1996 at 87, was close to many of the Surrealists, including Breton, and has frequently been grouped with them, but she always resisted labels, said Lissa Rivera, the curator of the exhibition.
“She was really not interested in contemporary movements,” she said, adding,“Although she was included in shows on Surrealism, she didn’t really want to be associated with that group because André Breton, she thought, was a misogynist.”
The Forgotten Bohemian Queen of the Paris Art World: Leonor Fini
MessyNessy writes: Bohemian “It Girl” of Paris, master of surrealist disguise and generally a badass female libertine, Leonor Fini was one of the most photographed people of the 20th century. And yet barely anyone I ask knows her name, even here in Paris, where she once ruled the bohemian Parisian art world, considered one of the few women to break into the French male-dominated surrealist movement.
Fini was also the creator behind the iconic perfume bottle of Elsa Schiaparelli’s “Shocking”, which later became the indisputable inspiration for Jean Paul Gaultier’s famous perfume bottles (picture to the left of Fini’s original silhouette bottle design below).
Is this image and this object examples of "clickbait"?
Art can be used in ways that transform the art into clickbait, but only when the capacity of the artwork to provoke in its audience a new thought, any thought that interrupts the trancelike flow and somnambulism of modern life, has been stripped away, or was never present in the first place.
The Dali Museum installation of Mae West's Lips
Dali's sofa reappears as a visual reference in The Guardian's Art and Design Blog on Mon 5 Mar 2007 with a post written by Germaine Greer and headlined:
Double vision
Surrealism's women thought they were celebrating sexual emancipation. But were they just fulfilling men's erotic fantasies?
Greer begins her blogpost:
Among the "surreal things" to be celebrated at the V&A's exhibition this month is the human body. The body when separated from its identity - or soul, if you prefer - becomes just another thing. In her book The Surreal Body, written to accompany the exhibition, Ghislaine Wood struggles mightily to present the body that "the surrealists endlessly manipulated and fetishised" as unisex or ambisex, but it is actually feminine. Not female. Feminine. Even in the deliberately dis-gendered figure of Claude Cahun, the operation of narcissism is purely feminine. Herbert Bayer mugging at his naked and mutilated self in the mirror is feminine. Hans Bellmer's dolls are all, horribly, feminine.
Hans Bellmer The Doll (La Poupée) 1935
In our polarised culture, in which real men may not be treated as mere body, and women must consider themselves primarily body, the portrayed body becomes the feminised body, regardless of its sex. At the same time that the women of surrealism were endlessly arraying and portraying themselves, as often in carefully posed photographs as in any other medium, the men of surrealism were disappearing into short back and sides, and suits and ties. Femininity was all image; masculinity had no image at all. Real men don't look in mirrors.
Greer picks up on the narcissistic element in some of the Surrealists psychological projections that is so revealing, and questionable. She continues:
In this conventional scenario, we must identify the men of surrealism as those who sought out sexual partners who corresponded to their fantasy and then forced fetishistic roles upon them. Eluard wrote poems about Nusch, and published them in a collection called Facile, with nude pictures of her by Man Ray.
Facile
He certainly wanted and orchestrated her exhibitionism, but did he actually create it? Perhaps Leonora Carrington's narcissism was imposed on her by Max Ernst, but it seems as likely that it is an aspect of female self-fashioning at any time, and does not correspond in any way to demands made by a male partner.
Indeed, it may be partly or entirely delusional. Léonor Fini's endless elaborations of her own likeness are unlikely to have been carried out in response to prompting from any of her "legions of lovers". Fini was convinced that she was inventing her own ideal of femininity: sensual, powerful, merciless. To a jaundiced eye, it is more of the same: huge hair, virginal breasts, tiny waists, long legs, Barbie before Barbie.
Barbie
The woman of surrealism is certainly stereotypical, but the stereotype seems to exist before the art, which is largely a capitulation to it. The women who walk through Delvaux's dreamscapes, for example, are all identical.
Woman Trees by Paul Delvaux 1937
Germaine Greer concludes with a typical flourish and an ironically posed question:
Surreal Things tracks the process by which the stereotypical female figure in surrealist photographs, poetry and painting, stepped into the shop window as the store-front mannequin. Where once Eileen Agar had to wear her hat made of gloves and her hat made of seafood herself, the mannequins would now wear Elsa Schiaparelli's rather more timid extravagances, a hat vaguely like a shoe, a gown with lines of padded quilting. Dalí was part of this activity, but he never subjected Gala to it. Indeed, when he had to deal with mannequins, he was likely to replace their heads with clumps of greenery.
The puzzle must remain: when Man Ray posed a nude woman as half a coat-stand in 1920, was he turning her into a servile object, or was he protesting against her own view of herself as a servile object? Today's growing girls are obsessed by supermodels who are ever more extravagant versions of the surrealist stereo-type, whose gorgeous heads might as well be replaced with clumps of greenery, for all the thinking they are allowed to do. We can't blame men for this, can we?
Q. We can't blame men for this, can we?
A. To quote the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers:
"Does the Pope shit in the woods?"
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