The video piece allows the audience to re-consider the importance of text, and how this can be equally, if not more erotic than the act of viewing sex itself. Some of the earliest forms of pornographic films are dated around the1890’s examples of peeping toms, homosexual acts and stag films. Examples of these include Le Coucher de la Mariée, 1896 and À l’Écu d’or ou la Bonne Auberge, 1910. An example that particularly interests me is The Peeping Tom, 1897; a silent movie which permits the audience to view through the peeping hole at events happening, granting us the field of vision the voyeur possesses.
Screenshot of The Peeping Tom, 1897
As pornography developed into the 1920’s further eroticism was present, permitting more nudity within films. It is from this stage that I intend to place the audience.
Screenshot of Eroticism in the 1920’s
When considering text and some of the earliest forms of erotica we can look to D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterleys Lover, 1928. To which the first edition was banned in the British empire and U.S.A until the late 1960’s as it were previously regarded as an obscene publication, then re-published by Penguin books at the time of the sexual revolution. Is it attributable to the Sexual revolution that the censorship of erotic texts have developed and changed from some of the earliest readable sexual content in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928,to Fifty Shades of Grey, 2011 (suggested to lack the class present in Lawrence’s writing, currently available in any bookstore to pick up and read).
An example of text that particularly interest me from within the first edition of Lady Chatterleys Lover (within the public domain) is:
‘Eh! What it is to touch thee!’ he said, as his finger caressed the delicate, warm, secret skin of her waist and hips. He put his face down and rubbed his cheek against her belly and against her thighs again and again. And again she wondered a little over the soft of rapture it was to him. She did not understand the beauty he found in her, though touch upon her living secret body, almost the ecstasy of beauty. For passion alone is awake to it. And when the passion is dead, or absent, then the magnificent throb of beauty is incomprehensible and even a little despicable; warm, live beauty of contact, so much deeper than the beauty of vision. She felt the glide of his cheek on her thighs and belly and buttocks, and the close brushing of his moustache and his soft thick hair, and her knees began to quivers. Far down in her she felt a new stirring, a new nakedness emerging. And she was half afraid. Half wished he would not caress her so, he was encompassing her somehow, yet she was waiting, waiting.’ (Lawrence,
By appropriating previous material it will permit the audience to realise the development of both text and video’s sexual content from its earliest stages up to the present; questioning the content that is released currently, and whether it holds the same perceived status it did in the past and further examining the truths within erotica, in comparison to the way that much erotic media is fabricated today. This piece will remain silent as homage to early media.
Artist As Curator 