Shy Erotics

Shy Erotics

#5 However, vitality breaks in various times and in various places, denying the obstacles of puritanism, hypocrisy and various prohibitions. Thus, even in the Middle Ages, with its traditional Christian doctrine, parallel to the living popular creative work, there is an official art that derives as a dictation from the church and its canons. Yet, we must not alienate the ideas of the existing eroticism, certain, though very much candid and repressed, and we cannot ignore the way certain forms and figures are painted and placed in some of the works on Mourning over Jesus, or in the unspecified sex of some of the sacral figures, then certain discrepancies with iconography and the art of painting etc.
The spiritual movement in the 12c, which proclaimed purity and denied the sensual, was a heresy movement for a review of the classic Christian doctrine. That led to the ideas of separating the soul from the body, for separating the corporeal from the harmonic unity of the spiritual-corporeal. Thus the concept of sinful is being broadened, by placing taboos on certain words and concepts. The consequences of the Christian religious dogmas are still present, subordinating our ideas on sexual morality, our definition on what is right and normal, and what is a deviation in that respect. But, at the same time, we should have in mind that the concepts of eroticism and the art of erotic in #6their modern meaning differ from their meaning and function that they held in the former, different and foreign traditions (Chinese, Hindu, African, Greek-Roman etc.) with a certain connection between the new eroticism and some pagan and mythical forms of culture. In several archaeological locations in Macedonia, from pre-historic and ancient times, objects with applied, ritual and decorative function, with clear erotic features have been discovered.

In the works created in the later periods of European tradition, one can follow the long history of eroticism, in its repressed and explicit form, moving between the affirmative and the negative, in oppositions incorporated in the relation between spiritual and corporeal, body and vice, purity and spirituality, heaven and hell, cynicism and idealism, and sensuality to pornography. These are the epochs of the Renaissance, baroque, classicism and romanticism, and then the modern movements of impressionism, post-impressionism, especially expressionism, surrealism and pop art, as well as the figurative art of the second half of the twentieth century, and especially the emergence of the performance and body art, transformational avant-garde etc.
#8 However, as it has been notified before, art has always been a stylization, a metaphor, surrealism, (Denis De Rougemont), and eroticism has always been a suggestion, an allusion, and a symbol.
In the twentieth century there is a notable increase in the interest in sex and eroticism, expressed in various forms of human activities and creativity. The expansion is without a precedent in the other epochs. This “obsessive” sexuality of our time, especially in the western countries, is being spread worldwide, gaining different forms of expression (posters, illustrated reviews, films, literature, popular magazines, comics, pop songs, games, striptease, music, art of painting and photography, theater, some philosophies etc. Driven by the mechanism of the commercial interest and morality, they rise from means of communications in terms of democracy and destroying of old norms and taboos, and become means of manipulation, thus neglecting their function of liberating from some old and new frustrations. The opinion that by revealing erotica, “our era has de-pornographied it” is acceptable in the sense of opening new issues and dilemmas. Thus, there are no firmly established criteria as to where eroticism ends and where pornography begins, because we are dealing with temporal and inconsistent categories.
Still, we can say that portraying explicit sex does not exclude art.
#7The modern movement in art is often connected to eroticism and the sexual revolution. There are various opinions, which hold that the erotic art is not only hedonistic and that it shouldn’t be equated with lust fulfillment, which is often of secondary importance in the artwork. Eroticism is identified through several aspects and themes, where the artwork can be “so full of erotic sensuality and still not to portray any sexual activity, according to the narrow definitions of the term”.
Art, as an act of creation and as a means of communication, a tendency to the Other and conveying of messages, carries an immanent erotic motivation. This, however, does not imply that a certain created work will have and express thematically determined erotic contents. The individual moods enriched by various experiences and wisdom, as tangibility and fantasy are conveyed into works, which reflect reality, and consciously or not they create its symbolic transposition. When it comes to eroticism in Macedonian modern art several moments have to be taken into consideration. Thus, its continuity of 4-5 decades, without any direct historical tradition, has caused various juxtapositions, fast or slow changes of certain styles, with no possibility of their thorough development. Apart from this, bearing in mind the inherited elements, the artistic stylization is emphasized here, more than in the rest of the Yugoslav territory. This stylization is a result of a certain hesitation and narrowing, inclinations to determined norms, and even auto– censorship. The Macedonian artist speaks the language of the hedonist, but still, with the indirect, modest language of the symbolic, metaphorical expression, almost free of forced gestures and more explicit marking of sexuality. But, at the same time we find certain examples of an unstoppable, hypocrisy-free eroticism, which revives in a modern way the pagan Dionysius desires of the modern man. Also, they reach to the poetic and lyrical aspects of eroticism, its aggressive and sadist intoned contents, then the themes such as nudes, prostitution, certain pervert plots, neurotic presentations etc. Bearing in mind the individual temperaments, the nature and the poetics of separate artists, all this is due to the versatile development of Macedonian contemporary art, provided by the liberation and the democratic changes of our society, especially since the fifties, as well as the openness to the world and the accepting, selectively more or less, of new experiences and ideas. At the same time, not avoiding contradictions and inconsistencies, in life and in art there starts the process of liberation and elimination of certain prejudices and taboos. That is a slow process, knowing that the erotic also means a revolt, a step over the borderline of the appropriate, a threat and alike, and this all only reveals the degree of our cultural development.
#9 Or, as Danilo Kiš lucidly remarks: “The erotic fiction, in order to reach a cultural value, must represent reality in its entirety and in a simplified form, so that everything that constitutes the inappropriate, as well as the vision of the infinite pleasure, are a mere sort of stylization, and are there only to make reality replaceable by a dream of a happier life.”

AuthorVladimir Veličkovski
2018-08-21T17:24:02+00:00 October 1st, 1998|Categories: Reviews, Blesok no. 05, Gallery|0 Comments