glory holes
Intimate friction show at the mattress factory in pittsburgh ‘glory holes’, an installation by american artist nina marie barbuto, delves into the histories of the spaces around us. the term, similarly used in hetero and homosexual copulation acts, serve as a portal for an anonymous yet intimate connection between the two bodies. as we move through the architectural space, we lose track of the larger figure, bones, and mass that surounds us.
“O impossivel”
They touch. They bite. They get warm. They penetrate. They are made. They get rid of. They stick their tongues in. They put the body in. They get body. They split up. They exist.
They want to be one. It is impossible (“O impossivel”). Which means that a single body, as you would like, is impossible. It can not. For a moment yes, for a moment they can. But no, they can’t. Impossible. They cannot be one. Despite the bites. Their bodies are different. They were born and will die self-absorbed, in themselves. Between them there is an abyss, a discontinuity. But they want to be continuous, they want their bodies to be one body. Since they cannot, they celebrate the sacrifice of the meat. “Essentially,” says Georges Bataille, “the field of eroticism is the field of violence, the field of rape.” Isn’t it violent, perhaps, to want to break the discontinuity of the other closed in on itself? Isn’t it violent to force the discontinuity of the other to be a continuous whole with him? O impossível by the Brazilian Maria Martins (1894/1973) shows the excesses of sex (take note: excess, sex). Or impossível is the moment in which the organs swell with blood and gush sexuality. The moment when animality makes us gloriously human.
Angelas Flood
Angela’s Flood (El diluvio de Angela), inspirado en el panel central de El Jardín de las Delicias, es un paraíso construido para personajes femeninos, un espacio alegre que cuestiona los reiterados comportamientos violentos y sexistas a menudo asociados al mundo de los videojuegos. El título procede de la protagonista, Angela Belti, una musculosa luchadora de la serie Power Instinct (Atlus, para Arcade, 1993) cuya apariencia desafió el estereotipo de los videojuegos retro llenos de mujeres esbeltas y semi desnudas. Una variedad de sprites, entre ellos personajes marítimos, pequeños elfos e insectos, conviven en esta utopía elaborada en 2000 líneas de HTML.
Mannequin Death
Jarring and violent yet strangely hypnotizing, the video references the Kantian sublime landscape and the “sex appeal of the inorganic,” which, the Italian philosopher Mario Perniola argues, marks the transition from an organic, bodily sexuality to an inorganic and artificial one.
THE BED EXPERIMENT ONE
Witness as the covers are pulled back to reveal the rites and rituals of the untamable Homo Sapiens in its favorite nesting place — a giant bed! Like a bizarre nature documentary THE BED EXPERIMENT tracks four males and four females, who while confronting their deepest fears and desires, balance the witty and weird against the painfully true to life.
“As the piece proceeds, the focus shifts from mating rituals to the antics of lovemaking, from the battle of the sexes to baby worship, and from dreams of conquest to nightmares of disembowelment. The bed turns from the cradle of civilization into a hospital cot, from a sultry desert to a tundra of monsters. As the scenes evolve — the performance is a 60-minute continuum — the tone mysteriously oscillates between extremes of farcicality or pathos. How the performers effect these wondrous transformations is one of the Adaptors’ most singular professional secrets”.