Thea Djordjadze:

What art is about is the construction of the materials, so the materials then become aestheticised or pleasurable. The pleasure of those materials has to do with the intensification of the body. So this impulse to art is to not make oneself seductive but to made oneself intense, and in the process to circulate some of that eros that would otherwise go into sexuality.

[Elizabeth Grosz interview with Julie Copeland on Radio National 2005]

Artwork by Thea Djordjadze:

Opening abdomens:

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving. Here this idea, whose memory lingers still over the kisses of man, is realised in its primal simplicity. No sooner has the union been accomplished than the male's abdomen opens, the organ detaches itself, dragging with itthe massof the entrails; the wings relax , and as though struck by lightning, the emptied body turns and turns on itself and sinks down into the abyss.

[Maurice Maeterlinck from The Life of the Bee 1901]

Images by Ernst Haeckel:

Simulating death when dead:

The fact is that there are hardly any reactions that it is not also able to perform when decapitated...in this condition, it can walk, regain its balance, move one of its threatened limbs autonomously, assume the spectral position, mate, lay eggs, build an ootheca, and, quite astonishingly, fall down in a false corpse-like immobility when confronted by danger or following a peripheral stimulation. I am deliberately using this indirect means of expressing myself because our language, it seems to me, has so much difficulty expressing, and our reason understanding, the fact that when dead, the mantis can simulate death.

[Roger Caillois on the Praying Mantis, from Space, Time and Perversion by Elizabeth Grosz 1995]

Artwork is by Hany Armanious:

Benjamin Armstrong:

Vision is suggested as the eye's phantom limb, or the compulsive effluence of a beached mollusc clumsily groping in the dark. In certain tableaux visions cut loose from their moorings, glibly pursuing an uncertain trajectory, perhaps with evil intent, ghosts in search of a body once more...perhaps something to eat. Elsewhere visions blindly collide, sag, and bend, becoming deflated...tired.

[George Huon, from Benjamin Armstrong: Gathering Exhibition brochure. Melbourne: Project Space, RMIT University, 2005]

Prosthetics:

Prosthetics: castration complex raised to the level of an art form.

[J.G. Ballard, Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century in A Users Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews 1996]




Artwork by Jana Sterbak:

Aimee Mullins, professional Athlete/actor/model:




Aimee Mullins and Alexander McQueen:





Aimee Mullins and Matthew Barney, Cremaster Cycle:

Horror/Pleasure

Francis Bacon has spoken of the beauty of a diseased mouth or a road accident, but it is more compelling to hear Orshi Drozdik describe her first encounter with an anatomical dissection when she was at art school. After the initial shock of seeing a beautiful woman lying disembowelled she discovered that the lining of her stomach as a gorgeous, lustrous purple material while the texture of the organs provided a wealth of exquisite forms and colours. From horror to aesthetic pleasure is a short loop.

[Excerpt from "Body" by Anthony Bond 1997]

Photographs by Andres Serrano:

Lilith

The first woman of the Judeo-Christian world order, Lilith, was not created out of male substance. God made her, like Adam, from dust. Lilith considered herself to be of equal rank, but Adam disputed her claim to equality. Because of her independent ways, Lilith was eventually replaced by a woman born from Adam. The memory of Lilith, however, was continued through the centuries with a variety of interpretations. In medieval Europe she was pictured as a ‘she-monster’ who averged herself by eating the flesh of children.

[text: unknown source]

Images of Lilith: