Joan Miró, Dancer, 1925. Oil on canvas, 115.5 x 88.5 cm. Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne, Switzerland.
Jacques Lacan reminds us, that in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own, if I can put it that way. Naturally, the other’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will be always your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite. The fact you are naked and pressing against the other is an image, an imaginary representation. What is real is that pleasure takes you a long way away, very far from the other. What is real is narcissistic, what binds is imaginary. So there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, concludes Lacan. His proposition shocked people since at the time everybody was talking about nothing else but “sexual relationships”. If there is no sexual relationship in sexuality, love is what fills
the absence of a sexual relationship.
Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.
Lacan doesn’t say that love is a disguise for sexual relationships; he says that sexual relationships don’t exist, that love is what comes to replace that non-relationship. That’s much more interesting. This idea leads him to say that in love the other tries to approach “the being of the other”. In love the individual goes beyond himself, beyond the narcissistic. In sex, you are really in a relationship with yourself via the mediation of the other. The other helps you to discover the reality of pleasure. In love, on the contrary the mediation of the other is enough in itself. Such is the nature of the amorous encounter: you go to take on the other, to make him or her exist with you, as he or she is. It is a much more profound conception of love than the entirely banal view that love is no more than an imaginary canvas painted over the reality of sex.
— Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love (via heteroglossia)
(via heteroglossia)
Álvaro Barcala ©
The Bates house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) was largely modeled on an oil painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The canvas is called “House by the Railroad” and was painted in 1925 by American iconic artist Edward Hopper. The architectural details, viewpoint and austere sky is almost identical as seen in the film.
(via bunnielake)
Trine Søndergaard, Interieur, 2007-12
c-print on dipond
Pablo Picasso: Deux recreations de L’infante Marie Marguerite (d’après Las Meninas, de Velásquez). 1957. Musée Picasso, Barcelone
Arthur Wesley Dow ( American, 1857-1922), Spring Landscape, 1892. Oil on canvas.
When one shows someone the king in chess and says: “This is the king”, this does not tell him the use of this piece—unless he already knows the rules of the game up to this last point: the shape of the king. You could imagine his having learnt the rules of the game without ever having been shown an actual piece. The shape of the chessman corresponds here to the sound or shape of a word.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (via its-ideology-stupid)
Michael Wolf - Apartment towers in Hong Kong.
Woman Photographs Herself Receiving Strange Looks in Public
“I now reverse the gaze and record their reactions to me while I perform mundane tasks in public spaces. I seek out spaces that are visually interesting and geographically diverse. I try to place myself in compositions that contain feminine icons or advertisements. Otherwise, I position myself and the camera in a pool of people…and wait.
The images capture the gazer in a microsecond moment where they, for unknowable reasons, have a look on their face that questions my presence. Whether they are questioning my position in front of the lens or questioning my body size, the gazer appears to be visually troubled that I am in front of them.”
Photographer: Haley Morris-Cafiero
Project: Wait Watchers
Thought this was actually really cool and I’d share it with you guys! Takes a lot to get up there and do something like this. Love it!
