Erotic photography that bridges the gap between hot and grotesque

I can't remember how I originally came across Clayton James Cubitt's work, but it struck a cord within me.  He captures the raw, grittiness of visceral, sexual experience in an alluring and disconcerting manner.  You want to look, but then you want to look away.  

I enjoy erotica that shows the cognitive reality innate in contemporary sexual fantasy.  Don't we all want the good and the bad?  His work stands strongly apart from his identity as a creator.  Each image poignantly faces the viewer head on.  Moreover, Cubitt tackles the high vs. low debate through his thorough attention to his chosen subjects, rejecting socioeconomic derived standards. 

Cubitt works as a fashion photographer in addition to his private photographic ventures.

Take a few minutes to browse through his digital portfolio.  I am surprised and delighted by the depth of his whole catalogue.

Ah the 60s, Claes Oldenburg, Neo-Concretism and the disappearance of the artist as creator

Currently, the Whitney Museum in NYC hosts 2 exhibitions featuring Claes Oldenburg's art.

A product of his time, Oldenburg, like many artists in the Americas and Europe, strove to remove identifiers pointing to his role as creator / artist from his work.  The art exists as an entity removed from its originator, fulfilled through the collaborative role of the spectator / viewer and through the metamorphosis of normative, decontextualized objects via the manipulation of size and texture.

American Pop art, in many ways, is consistent with the neo-objecthood of Latin American Neo-Concretism, except that it requires even less initiation into the subject matter.  Oldenburg chooses images to which any spectator can relate and react, because they are so common, removing the hierarchical constraints of Western cannonical art.  And with works like Giant BLT, 1963 and French Fries and Ketchup, 1963, Oldenburg  demonstrates the indicative nature of distinctly American iconographic imagery.  That's what we are -- a nation of deli sandwiches and fries.  A decade after becoming a naturalized citizen, Oldenburg showed his compliance in his flaccid sculptures showcasing American culture, while bridging the gap between the classes through Pop Art puffery.

The exhibition runs through August 2009.

I'm reviving this blog, god willing...

If anyone reads this post, let it be known, I am determined to revive this little blog.  If only to give it the proper chance it deserves, as when I quit posting, Eyes In Disguise had just begun.

Where it will lead, we shall see.

Hopefully to the amusement of myself and others, except for any lurking internet stalkers out there, to whom I say: fuck off!

ooookkkkk...........

here goes, who knows what today will bring.