Sexual Context: A Re-History is a project where I take significant artworks and re-contextualize their sexual content in the spirit of alternative, revisionist, reclaimed, and reinvented histories.
I began with 4 categories: The Eroticized, the De-Eroticized, the Symbolic, and the Radical as a way of differentiating between the ways that sex and sexuality are handled in the fields of art history and erotic art history. The first selection is an outline or sketch, that consisted of 12 works, by 12 different artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Bontecou, Robert Mapplethorpe, Titian, Paul Gauguin, Egon Schiele, Salvador Dali, Manet, Catherine Opie, Nayland Blake, Balthus,and Linda Nochlin. Future artists may include some of the following + : Andre Masson, Carolee Schneeman, Judy Chicago, Gustave Courbet, David Wojnarowicz, Jacqueline Livingston, Sally Mann, Jeff Koons, Judith Bernstein, Meret Oppenheim, Kara Walker, Louise Bourgeois etc etc. My hope is that this project will expand into a book or exhibit + catalogue.
I include in each example an image, some pre-existing historical text about that image, and my “response” text. Response text is not intended or designed to supplant, erase, undo or over-ride the pre-existing text but rather to complement it, or to provide a viable “alternative” using language that pre-supposes a sex+, trans-friendly, post-colonial, rather fantasy land normativity. Enjoy!
#1 Georgia O’ Keeffe “Grey Line with Black, Blue, and Yellow” 1932 (Category 1, The Eroticized)
Art Historical Text: “When thinking about erotic symbolism in art Georgia O’Keeffe springs to mind. The painting to the right is a detail of a flower but it is also an excellent visual symbol of an open and flushed vulva.
At first glance you see a flower and, on reflection, you might grasp features of female anatomical details such as the clitoral hood, the clitoris, the labia majora, and the labia minora. O’Keeffe is making an interesting statement in associating the vagina with a flower. The vagina is to humanity what a flower is to nature: it is life-giving, beautiful, and fragile, yet resilient.
There is a strong sense that we are entering into the flower, but we also get a sense that inside is a whole new universe open to us.” LINK
RESPONSE: Georgia O’Keeffe diverged from the realism practiced by her peers choosing instead to focus on familiar forms with a beautifully simple, but accentuated details that effect a transformation that can become very abstract . After moving West, away from New York, she drew inspiration from natural forms in the environment that surrounded her.
O’Keeffe uses a rich color palette to add a fleshy quality to the organic forms she represents. Known for her landscape treatment of flowers, these organic forms become a fertile ground for the viewer to encounter other organic forms to which it can be compared.
