Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Amazing Art #1 - Justine Lai

This link is pretty much as NSFW (that's "not safe for work" if you haven't visited the internet lately) as you can get without being actual porn. But oh ho ho is it AMAZING.

Justine Lai's mission statement, straight from her website: "In Join Or Die, I paint myself having sex with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order [emphasis mine]. I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated. I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness. It would be easy to let the images slide into territory that's strictly pornographic—the lurid and hardcore, the predictably "controversial." One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its "Fuck the Man" symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do. March 2009"

Check it out: http://bit.ly/16c0g

No comments:

Post a Comment