pussy politics and all for harley.
map of tasmania by Amanda Palmer and The Young Punx.
thank you everyone who took part in our slideshows and discussions during the lesbian lives conference 11-12 feb, brighton. its wonderful to know that our pictures stir people, whether it’s with disgust, memories or empowerment.
also, check out the beautiful pictures Anna Gibson took of me at the marlborough theatre in brighton.
johanna
i’ve been thinking about the tastefulness of blood lately. this has two reasons.
first reason follows on from the previous post, about the “menstrual machine” that simulates the pain and blood of a period for those who don’t experience this biologically. even though I like this idea, and as i said, i find it rather beautiful, this is also a problem. it is so tasteful. tastefully and discreetly presented, sexy design, a cyborg lack of human dirt and discharge. maybe it’s a european thing to want it real.
my period this month was very real, late and thick and brownish. it didn’t inspire me so i didn’t take a picture this month. a kind of self cencorship that i’m quite upset about now in hindsight. i had a chance after sex last week. the person i was with concluded the session with something like “just the way i like it, anal sex and blood everywhere”. i should of course have taken a picture. tasteful or not, it would have been real.
this leads me onto the second point, which i have touched upon previously as well, in self-portraiture: the responsibility of representation. I haven’t thought about this in any real depth but it concerns a second way in which blood can be percieved as distasteful – when it is connected to violence. as i failed at taking a picture this month, i give you an old one, from may of last year. in a time when everyone is obsessing about vampires, and me too a little bit, this fits well. but out of context, i think this can be seen as quite a violent picture that has symbolism that i was not conscious of when i took it, religious, abusive, sacrificial. deeply entrenched cultural images.
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for me there is an eroticism and beauty in crossing the skin border, mixing the inside and the outside of the body. some people do this to a much much greater (sexual or otherwise) extent than i am prepared to right now but there is an incredible power in starting to discover this. there is a trust and submissive vulnerability, but also a dominant force, in both giving and receiving someone else’s insides, and i’m talking about consensual/blood now. in the picture is my blood and what it really portrays is autoeroticism. i think that there is always a certain amount of violence inherent in the pleasure of being penetrable, leaking and open.
as i think the theme of both violence and distastefulness goes through many of our pictures, not to mention other queer and feminist artists’ work, i borrow the title for this post from this year’s anarchopride in stockholm. the theme is “their power, our resistance” which i think sums up my thoughts perfectly. their borders, their tastefulness, our stains, our pleasure.
johanna
To follow up on the long text I posted below on feminist art and self-portraiture, I thought I’d share my July 2009 picture which, by accident, as sometimes happens, became an ode to Tracy Emin’s My Bed.
I remember when I was at the University of Brighton and Emin came to talk to us, and she told us how absolutely furious she was when a gallery had bought her bed piece and installed it themselves in their gallery. Her bed was hers to install, whomever owned it.
