The Blowfish Blog

[Caught in the Net] Modern Art

The human form — often naked and occasionally in the midst of carnal acts — is a favorite subject for the visual and plastic arts, from fine art to lowbrow pornographic scrawlings. Here’s a look at a few artists who do arresting, memorable work that just happen to have sexual aspects, and who are kind enough to put some of their work online for all to enjoy . . .

First, someone with a Blowfishie connection. I originally knew of Richard Kadrey as a science fiction writer (we even have the same literary agent), but he’s also a photographer of some note, and he shot the cover for the very first Leviathan catalog for Blowfish back in 2003. More recently he’s been doing nude/fetish photography with science fictional and surreal touches. He says, “Science fiction and the human body are inextricably linked through velocity. Both forms (the flesh and the word) are hurtling toward a future that is probably a hundred times weirder and more unexpected than anything we’re yammering about today.” SF blog io9 put together a gallery of his images with some alluring, disturbing work. (When you’re done looking at that, go buy his novel Butcher Bird.)

Photographer Virgiliu Narcis specializes in images that combine the human and the inhuman. His pictures of women with zippers for vaginas and men with sausage-grinding machines in their crotches are clever visual jokes, but some of his other images are much more profoundly strange, while others are simply gorgeous. See a generous sampling of his photography at his website. I’m especially fond of the one with the apple in the birdcage . . .

Stuart Allen gets credit for one of the cleverest concepts, interrogating the very nature of what constitutes a pornographic image. His “pixlporn” series is a collection of digital images of nude celebrities, from still images and screengrabs from film, with subjects including Halle Berry, Paris Hilton, Amanda Peet, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Shia LeBeouf, among others. The twist? Each image is an incredibly zoomed-in detail that consists of just a few pixels from each image, maybe 4, maybe 9, maybe 16, with the result being a few usually flesh-colored blocks (though each is tagged with its subject and source, like “Matt Damon’s Ass,” “source, film: The Talented Mr. Ripley” or “Pete Wentz’s Penis,” “source, Stolen Cell Phone Photograph”) It’s not lascivious, but it’s smart and funny, and smart and funny are in much shorter supply than lasciviousness on the internet. When you get right down to it, all of us, from gorgeous celebrities to pudgy online columnists, are just collections of pixels . . . at least when you look at us online.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.