Pink lips, pink tongue, pink jelly. Do yourself a favour and watch this video on 'full screen' option on your computer. Marilyn Minter, who is based in New York, has been one of those artists in which I'm not sure if I love her work or hate it. She blurs the lines between the beautiful and the grotesque, questioning conventional notions of both. What is beautiful? What is grotesque? Her works are completed with a high gloss, high definition, hyper-real execution capturing images such as women wearing designer stilettos, covered in mud and dirt. She works in photography, painting with enamel on sheets of metal and recently (by accident) in video.
This video I'm featuring above is a short exert of Minters Green Pink Caviar which totally captivated me when i first saw it earlier this year at MOMA in New York. Shot with a macro lens and slowed down to almost snails pace, it is completely mesmerizing and definitely sent me into a whole new world, where detail became oh soooo seductive. With a macro perspective of such detail, the womans tongue slowly sliding across the screen, sucking up and spitting out the slippery jelly, is both gracious and visceral. It is a feeling that is felt deep within ones own body on viewing this work, as if her tongue were licking our internal organs with long slow sliding strokes, sucking in and spitting out our jelly. This is were the work grabs you and is, I imagine, what Minter was hoping for. Is it beautiful to feel as if your internal organs are being caressed and stimulated by a tongue, or is it grotesque? Our own perceptions of sensuality are being asked to be layed out on the table with those of what society claims they should be; to be compared, discussed and challenged.
I was so lured and seduced by this lush work that Katya had to literally grab my arm to drag me away from it otherwise i would have stayed in MOMA for days, like a stunned mullet! I like it when a work does that without giving away too much, sending me into a state of vagueness, emptying my brain of any thoughts whatsoever and allowing me to succumb to a place full of sensuality and sexuality.
You can check out more of her work at http://www.salon94.com/artists/20/
I was so lured and seduced by this lush work that Katya had to literally grab my arm to drag me away from it otherwise i would have stayed in MOMA for days, like a stunned mullet! I like it when a work does that without giving away too much, sending me into a state of vagueness, emptying my brain of any thoughts whatsoever and allowing me to succumb to a place full of sensuality and sexuality.
You can check out more of her work at http://www.salon94.com/artists/20/
No comments:
Post a Comment