Session 6: Erotic, Photography and
Literature
Chair: Dianne Bunch
The Theology of the Erotic in the Photographic
Art of Joel-Peter Witkin
Ingrid Pruss
Western Connecticut State Univ, United States
Women with penises; a decapitated, stitched corpse strapped to a chair; a crisp, white linen napkin with a bunch of grapes, a fish, and a human foot offered to the viewer; a Catholic priest de-faced with a mask made in flagrant intensity with black marker – vestments stained at the edges and the four armed creature revealed; a woman masturbating on a profile of the man in the moon. These are just a small sampling of the subjects Witkin addresses in his photographic art. Clearly the eye of this artist finds the scenes he invents and sets up to be invested with significant energy, a life-force (or eros) of their own, that the viewer is impotent to shut out of his/her psyche. Whether one likes this art or is repulsed and nonplussed by it, everyone would agree that it makes a powerful impression; however, most mainstream Christian and psychoanalytic audiences would see Witkin as demon-possessed and would denounce his images as either profane and/or indicative of a deeply troubled, if not insane, soul. In fact, Pat Robertson did just that. This paper begs to differ and believes Witkin’s oeuvre embraces the infinite eros of Divinity operating polymorphously in the world. I will argue, not only that Witkin’s work is not profane but, that it is truly sacred. Holy sex and sexy holiness have been a part of intellectual history since the early medieval period, yet the 20 th and 21 st centuries seem to have lost the link between these two deeply-seated and deeply-seeded forces – unified in and through the Passion. This paper aims to re-engage that conversation in a new way.
Erotic and Trivial in the Eastern-European Literature
Danial Sorin Vintila
West University of Timisoara, Romania
The omnipresence of the erotic, in the
most diverse facets, from suggestion to pornography, in all forms of art, is
an almost common fact. Like in the West-European and North American literature,
the literature of Central– and East–European countries have
each great writers in whose works the theme of Eros is knitted with
that of history, politics or other topics.
In the largest majority
of the works of well-known writers (B. Hrabal, P. Esterházy, M. Cărtărescu)
the erotic is aesthetized on a rather high level, its function at the level
of narration being relatively easy to grasp. The last decade has marked the
appearance, in the European literature, of a new wave novelists who practice
a novelist speech more and more overloaded with useless trivialities.
The phenomenon
has not gone round Romania . In the last two-three years, a group of young and
very young Romanian novelists have impressed the critics of literature and the
public by experimenting the trivial side limit of the literary language. The
aesthetic function of the erotic has disappeared, or at least is significantly
diluted. The avalanche of pornographic scenes, of vulgar gestures and replies,
of sordid places, out of which any beauty is excluded, tends to put a question
mark regarding the artistic finality of these literary experiments.
In my paper,
starting from the manners of approaching of the erotic in literature (I will
call them aesthethizing and respectively groundless) I
will try a comparison between the two categories of writers, meant
to justify, still, the necessity of the effort to value and hierarahize
literature.