Pleasures of the Flesh

Around this time last year I was having a love affair with Yves Klein crossed with Hermann Nitsch and all his Vienna Actionist sordid pals, as well as a certain taste for meat (aesthetically, that is) and that strain of feminism that is pro-pornography - the ones that love a little hardcore female nudity.




I was also pretty heavily immersed in Marquis de Sade, Bataille and maybe a little Sacher Masoch, I'm not too sure anymore. This made for some extreme expanding of my horizons of the fantastically perverted.



So then images embedded in my brain from even longer ago, images from the New French Extremist cinema, started to surface: along the lines of a real time rape scene, S&M dungeons, and Beatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo straining to satisfy their lust for caniballism.


Below are stills from the film I made - it was important that I directed myself: I always felt slightly strange about Klein's women being so central to his work whilst having no creative input.






I recently came across these cut-up images on Olivier Zahm's blog, which connect a lot in my mind to the heady cut-up mixture of meat and sexuality (flesh) - the living and the dead - that I was trying to achieve last year.



And so, in the ever-authorative words of the Bible:
"When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." (James 1:15)

And in the more relevant words of Bataille:
"Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death."

If this be the case, Bringeth Forth Death.