Fashion!

For some odd reason I have an unhealthy obsession with fashion advertisements. In some cases it provides a wealth of grotesque imagery combining violence, sex, and of course a healthy dose of materialism.

Izima Kaoru has shot advertisements for Gucci and Vivienne Westwood and exhibited a series called "Landscapes with Corpses." All of his corpses are impeccably dressed.

Julia deVille uses taxidermy to create jewlery.



Puma had a little fun with this one.


-theresa

The pictures were too sad...

In further exploration of my fascination with conjoined twins (thanks Mutter!) I discovered links regarding Dr. Mengele and the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials." Mengele was the most famous "doctor"/mad-scientist who experimented on Jews during the Holocaust.

During his experimentation, Mengele would specifically target twins (scroll down the the part labeled "experiments on twins.") At times, he would sew twins together in attempts to CREATE conjoined twins. He would poke or torture one side of one twin in order to see if the other side of the other twin would feel anything. Often times, the twins would die because of damage done to their severed nerves.

I remember a couple of years ago I went to the Holocaust Museum in WashDC and they had a fascinating exhibit on medical experimentation.

Although ridiculously interesting, these types of medical experiments are always tricky. It leaves me to wonder if things like the Mudder Museum are contributing to science or exploiting the people's freakishness?

-Ali Blum

Anatomy Rocks

The Mütter Museum had some images that I've seen before, when I took a class that discussed early anatomy texts, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about that. One of the first anatomy textbooks was De humani corporis fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) by Andreas Vesalius, published in the mid 1500s. Here are some cool images from it.

This next one is a famous one I like quite a lot. The words on the podium things say "Genius lives forever. All else is mortal"

And here is Mr. Vesalius himself.

Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band

This video excerpt of Bonzo Dog Doodah Band is a favorite of mine. Short as it is, it captures the degree of silliness and absurdity that they would bring to any performance. Here's a mark of authenticity: the guys from Monty Python said that the guys from this band gave them the idea to be silly. Really, the front man, Vivian Stanshall, is to be given full credit for the spirit of the band I think. If you watch more from him, you will see how he is a genuine eccentric. It was his nature to defy convention not because he wanted to, but because he was just being himself. At his best, he was highly original and at worst from another planet. I really recommend that you guys check out more of his stuff.

~al

Mary Ellen Mark

Let just say that I want to share a picture with you. I will put it here.

If I want to show you where the website is, I will link to it.

The girly-grotesque

Time for a little subversion of the ultrafem? Liz Wolfe is an artist who photographs things out of Lisa Frank's nightmares. Pretty popsicles. Candy, flowers and cupcakes. Dolls and...tentacles? Tea parties and meat tea? Sure, why not.

-Theresa

Two Unrelated Pictures

The first picture is a photoshop but just looking at it really creeps me out. I remember having a nightmare about something like that when I was a kid and when I came across it I had to post it to share.

The second one is a frozen homeless man in Detroit. I wish I had more information, like the year and the circumstances, but it's a shame there was nothing we could do for him and he had to die in such a terrible way.

We are Siamese (if you please...)

I was watching some show about "medical mysteries" and came across this one particular Indian girl who was born with 8 limbs. It turns out the other four limbs belong to a parasitic twin who had not fully developed a head... they were attached at the pelvis if you can believe it. Imagine giving birth to that. Ouch.

Anywho, her village thought that she was the reincarnation of the goddess Lakshmi, the patron of wealth and prosperity. Obviously, they named the baby "Lakshmi" and were very hesitant when TLC came into their village with cameras, hoping to make a profit off this baby.

Eventually, she underwent surgery to remove her parasitic twin. It took 27 hours of surgery and a team of thirty doctors, but eventually they removed all the parasitic limbs, broke and reset her pelvis and clubbed feet.

The coolest part of this whole story is the photos... obviously.

- Ali blum

Sexual Cannibalism

No fun pictures, today. Just thought the idea of sexual cannibalism is pretty interesting. The most common example is probably that of the praying mantis, although it's really an overstated issue for the vast majority of mantises (although one breed does engage in it often). If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll summarize it like this: Basically, the male mantis will sneak up on a female mantis in an attempt to mate with her. If she is quick enough, she'll turn around in time to bite his head off and eat it. Not before the male has mounted her and is in prime position, though. From there, his headless body continues to copulate, inseminating the female mantis.

A few other species engage in sexual cannibalism. Here's the (entire) page of one type of mite:

Serromyia femorata is a species of biting midge in the subfamily Ceratopogoninae. The species is noted for its peculiar mating practice: during mating, the ventral surfaces and mouthparts of the partners touch. After copulation, the female sucks out the body fluid of her mate through the mouth, thereby killing it (sexual cannibalism).

Another interesting, if slightly less cannibalistic, mating ritual is commonly performed by the ant:

"When the mating urge comes, something pretty stupendous happens--by human standards. 'Both the queen [female] and the prince [male] have wings,' Levine [ant tycoon] said. 'They fly 100 feet straight up in the air and mate.' After the quick tryst, several things happen, all bad in the case of the male. 'His wings fall off and he drops dead,' Levine said. 'The female also sheds her wings and falls to the ground. Then she begins laying eggs almost immediately. For possibly as long as the next 15 years after that single mating, she lays eggs almost continuously. Hundreds of thousands of them. The survivors become her colony.'"

Rent-a-family

I've heard about this in a couple of different places. New companies are renting out family, that is strangers pretending to be family, to people in Japan, who for some reason or another don't get sufficient meaningful time with their own families. People can also rent bosses or colleagues, or people to boost attendance at their wedding. Apparently, business is booming. I find this both fascinating and creepy. The family unit is not what it used to be. Will such things spread to other parts of the world?

Here are a couple articles about it.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19920513&slug=1491524

http://www.ibtimes.co.in/articles/20090608/wedding-japan-recession.htm

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/53953,news-comment,news-politics,the-fear-behind-japan-flourishing-rent-a-friend-business-psychology

Zdzislaw Beksinski

I am a huge fan of the fantasy genre as well as some post apocalyptic stuff so Beksinski's art is something I really enjoy. His website contains a lot more pieces. I thought he was a very good surrealist artist as well. He was murdered in 2005. The last picture is my favorite. His style reminds me of that Triumph of Death painting by Pieter Bruegel, another piece that I enjoy. http://www.beksinski.pl/

The Fog of War

This is a collection of photographs of people wounded in war before the advent of modern plastic surgery. I know I've heard about how modern surgery has been able to save a lot of people in Iraq who would have died in previous wars. The flip side is that more soldiers are coming home disfigured. These pictures were somewhat sobering in revealing that this isn't solely a modern problem. Its seems grotesque to me how monstrous these soldier appear. Its easy as an observer to comfort one's by reasoning that these soldiers should be happy to just be alive given their injuries. I think the scary question that always lingers in the back of your head is how possible is it for these people to return to any form of normalcy?

-Christian

Bataille & Carnival Smut

For those unfamiliar with Georges Bataille I have chosen two selections from his work.

A lot of reading follows but more can be found at Supervert or at your local bookstore. I highly recommend Literature and Evil for philosophy/criticism and My Mother, Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man for literary smut.

Excerpted from The Cruel Practice of Art:

The Painter is condemned to please. By no means can he transform a painting into an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds from the field where it is planted, but the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors. Actual torture can also be interesting, but in general that can't be considered it's purpose. Torture takes place for a variety of reasons. In principle it's purpose differs little from that of the scarecrow: unlike art, it is offered to sight in order to repel us from the horror it put's on display. The painted torture, conversely, does not attempt to reform us. Art never takes on itself the work of the judge. It does not interest us in some horror for it's own sake: that is not even imaginable. (It is true that in the Middle Ages religious imagery did this for Hell, but that is precisely because art was hardly separable from education.) When Horror is subject to the transfiguration of an authentic art, it becomes a pleasure, an intense pleasure, but a pleasure all the same.

To see in this paradox the mere effect of a sexual vice would be vain.

It is with a sort of mute, inevitable, inexplicable determination, like that in dreams, that the fascinating specters of misery and pain have always lurked among the background figures in this carnival of a world. No doubt art does not have the same essential meaning as the carnival and yet, in each, a part has always been reserved for that which seems the very opposite of pleasure and amusement. Art may have finally liberated itself from the service of religion, but it maintains it's servitude with regard to horror. It remains open to the representation of that which repulses.

Next, a warning, this is not work/library/child safe. Don't show your mom unless she's very, very cool and more than a little crazy. It is explicit, violent, and absurd. You have been warned. From The Story of the Eye:

She had no qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing.

Simone meanwhile amused herself by slipping the eye into the profound crevice of her ass...she tried to keep the eye there simply by squeezing her buttocks together. But all at once, it zoomed out like a pit squooshed from a cherry, and dropped on the thin belly of the corpse, an inch or so from the cock.

In the meantime, I had let Sir Edmond undress me, so that I could pounce stark naked on the crunching body of the girl; my entire cock vanished at one lunge into the hairy crevice, and I fucked her hard while Sir Edmond played with the eye, rolling it, in between the contortions of our bodies, on the skin of our bellies and breasts. For an instant, the eye was trapped between our navels.

Well. That about says it all.

Yesterday when talking in class comic book super heroes came up and I was reminded of this book that I have. Secret Identity is a book about the lives of one of the original Superman creators after leaving DC. Joe Shuster was the guy who originally drew Superman and developed the iconic look. After the creators lost the rights to the comic, they were left scrambling to make a living. Shuster ended up drawing fetish porn for the mob.

-Christian

Do Not Eat Near These Pictures

A teratoma is a tumor that contains normal human tissues. Found most commonly in the ovaries and testicles, teratomas are capable of growing hair, teeth, bones and sometimes limbs. They contain tissue that resembles brain, liver and lung tissues. Some cases have even reported finding embryos encapsulated within a teratoma... yep, that is correct, a pregnant tumor. Most recently, in October 08, a doctor removed a brain tumor only to find it housed feet and slightly developed body parts.

In some cases, teratomas are confused with parasitic twins, conjoined twins where one "parasite" half-formed body feeds off of the life of another fully human body.

Besides the obvious reasons, teratomas are grotesque because they resemble the monsters I used to imagine that lived under my bed.

Without completely rewording the entire articles, I would definitely check out some of these wikiPages... this is some weird shit.

Enjoy your lunches friends,

Ali Blum

Unnatural life

Mummys are cool, but equally cool is the living dead. Seeing all these posts about death and the dead made me think about one of the most terrifying themes in literature, people giving inanimate things life. Frankenstein is obviously a good example. Another one that less people are familiar with is the story of the Golem, a legend that takes place in the 1600s. Basically the story is that the Rabbi of Prague, using mysticism, creates a Golem to protect the Jewish community from anti-semitism, but the Golem eventually gets out of control and has to be destroyed. There was an German silent film made about the legend in 1920 called Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How he came into the World). Here’s a picture from the film.

I dunno, whenever read these stories I can help thinking about our technological age, computers, robots, and how this fictional fear of unnatural life doesn’t actually seem quite so ridiculous. MIT is apparently working on personal robots with a human-like range of expressions. Is that creepy to anyone else?
-Lauren

The Twenty-Eight Famous Murders With Verses

These pictures are from a remade 1988 print collection of The Twenty-Eight Famous Murders With Verses which is based off of the 1866 by Getsuoka Yoshitoshi. It's called "Ero-Guru… a type of Japanese illustration that depicts extreme acts of violence in an erotic manner. The word ero-guru means “erotic grotesque nonsense” and the loosely defined movement goes beyond illustration into literature, film and music."

I wish I had more information on it, or a link to the rest of the series.

Odilon Redon

So I mentioned him in one of the first days of class but I'll bring him up again.

Odilon Redon. One of my favourite artists. And I am just reminded of his work repeatedly while doing these readings. In On Ugliness, for instance, malformations of the human form. It is exactly what makes his work so mesmerizing for me. I just love everything about his early charcoals. His later work, I'm not so keen on. But his early works. Those are art.

Here's some examples. They get cut off by my browser, but if you click them you can see the uncropped images. I don't really have much to say about them, not for lack of knowledge on the subject but because I think that the pictures show so much more than I could. Gosh I just love them.












-Colby

Genie in a Bottle

Recently, I have become fascinated with the concept of "feral children." For those of you who do not know, a feral child is a child who has been raised in isolation or by animals. Think Romulus/Remus and Tarzan.

In 1970, welfare authorities discovered a feral child (who they call "Genie") who had been strapped to a potty chair in a dark room
for 13 years. She had been beaten and isolated from the world by her father. Other accounts of feral children include a wolf-boy and an abandoned boy who was raised in the African bush by monkeys. These accounts seem too strange to be true, almost circus freak-ish.

While reading a book about Genie and other ferals, I came across this interesting passage...
"So wild children exist in the fault line between disgust and desire. They embody our desire for escape, freedom and wonder; yet they also provoke the disgust felt for the merely corporeal, the wholly physical- the disgust for that which has no self, no love and no remorse" (237).
- Savage Girls and Wild Boys, Michael Newton

It is definitely an interesting book and will be available in VanPelt as soon as I return it.
Also, if you have a spare forty minutes or so, there is a really great documentary on the discovery of Genie and the attempts to assimilate her into society.

Part 1

-Ali Blum