Saturday, December 16, 2006

SLOANE'S ARTWORK INSPIRES EVENT

Check out where I went this weekend. These pictures by Janice Sloane, a long time legendary underground guerilla girl of the East Village really got me thinking.

Do these pictures invite a sense of sensuality versus despair, or both?

What lies beneath the shock value? I was haunted by the fact that the stretched skin belonged to Sloane's dying lover, and constitutes an elegy of his disappearing flesh which she is nursing to the grave?

When art is great it seems to me the crucial thing is that it becomes more than entertainment, but rises to the realm of fetish, ritual, redemption, disclosure, the nightmare and orgasm caught down on the page in the flashbulb of a second.

With that in mind I restlessly emailed Carole Maso, who remains one of my favorite writers well over thirteen years after I first read her to New York to show a group of psychoanalysts a series of avant films and how they spark the translational mappings of the dream screen into narrative text.

More details will follow as the event unfolds. Check back soon.