Is it now possible once again to speak of art and eroticism in the same breath? Erotic content in art has been discredited in the recent past. First, by formalists, who argued that content had no bearing on aesthetic quality, and secondly, by feminists who pointed out that erotic content in art was almost exclusively a male preserve – a product and symbol of the patriarchal relations that permeate Western society.
Arguments against "pleasure" in art have also divided politically into right and left, at times shifting, from right wing puritanism to left-wing Spartanism, and back again, from right-wing libertarianism to left-wing sexual liberalism. The degree of self-indulgent pleasure considered socially acceptable, and expressible, appears to have a natural ebb and flow.
We have evolved somewhat from those rigid formalist positions of the middle part of this century toward an art that addresses issues other than the phenomenon of the form. Art once again has become a way to talk about the world we live in, how we live in it and the issues that affect our lives. The human body is significant – as it has always been – a potent metaphor for human complexity, the container of culture, the object of desire, the mantle of character, the symbol of nurturing life and gnawing death. The body is also a battlefield where a contest of ideologies is fought out. Questions such as who controls your body, how you use it, how and when it is permissible to represent the body, are issues not only of art, but of the whole of society.
Anette Larsson 's pleasure vision focuses our attention on these issues. Her series of grainy, back-lit photographic transparencies contain intimate keyhole images of the artist naked before a mirror. The radically cropped photographic representations of her body are almost indecipherable except for the most minimal indications and vaguest contours of torso, limb or hand. Inverted, each panel becomes a puzzle piece; a curving expanse of rolling flesh rising here, the cavity and sharp curve of a joint falling there. Together, these images form an abstract composition of amorphous erotic energy.
A hand, a shoulder, or a muscle twisted in the grip of a hand, may not coincide with our traditional notions of eroticism, yet bathed in the ethereal blue world of pleasure vision, they approach the familiar strangeness of the erotic fetish, where a loved one's hand or neck becomes an object of desire. Perhaps even more than the fetishistic desire of the other, these particular images speak about a personal, autoeroticism – a questioning of this physical container within which we live, how it works and how it feels, and yes even loving it a bit, in a somewhat backhanded and abusive way.
The intimate self-embrace narrated in pleasure vision recalls the iconography of commercial advertising. Where we see a model's self-directed touch and posture of obsessive physical introspection, we know at once that this message is about the fears and uncertainties we have about our own bodies, and the redemptive promises that advertising offers us, of this or that brand of hygiene, fragrance or undergarment. Advertising exploits the complex relationship women have with their bodies to sell products. Fear and insecurity will dissolve into confidence and a feeling of well-being we are promised, with each new purchase.
Anette Larsson has adopted the techniques of commercial advertising and the glamour industry to communicate a different message. She has detached the significant gesture of touching oneself from the message of personal inadequacy and the objective of consumption. Turning the camera on herself, she has taken back control of her own image. Minimizing references to specific body parts, her images suggest a desire that is at once centred in the body and yet boundless. These images salvage a private (and public) pleasure from the commercial realm. Commercial advertising exploits fear and shame based in ignorance. Pleasure, Larsson may be telling us, is centered in self-knowledge.
Gordon Hatt, 1999
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