Heterotopia: hinterlands, wonderlands, borderlands and brothels
"Heterotopia can be described as a material space as well as a conceptual, virtual, urban, and even geopolitical spatial construct, including hinterlands, wonderlands, borderlands and brothels. Heterotopia is an unwieldy collection of Other space - including museums, military camps, colonies, libraries, and cemeteries."
(Ace Sophia, 13 February 2008)
Fig. 1 Fran's Star Ranch / Angel's Ladies (4miles North of Beatty, Nevada on U-95)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Conflicted Selves: Women, Art, & Paris 1880-1914
"By the mid-nineteenth century, the academic tradition of the Paris Salon was under attack by artists who wanted to break with the image of an ideal female body, and replace it with a reflection of the nude as it might be seen in the contemporary, modern world. The realist artist Edouard Manet shocked the Salon public with Olympia in 1863, a portrait that completely disregarded the formalist tradition of painting the nude, and depicted a low-class prostitute sprawled out on an unmade bed. Contemporaries labelled Manet's technique rough and crude, his brushstrokes hurried and inconsistent, and his use of colour alarming.[8] Olympia's skin, in particular, caused outrage. Unlike the polished finish of classical nudes, Manet had used tones of yellow and grey, which made her skin look sallow, and had outlined her figure in a rough, dark line, which gave her a flat and two-dimensional appearance. Art critics noted that Olympia had 'dirty hands and wrinkled feet;' 'her face is stupid, her skin cadaverous [...] she does not have a human form.'[9] They also criticized Manet's break with the traditional rules of the gaze. Unlike Venus's seductive, yet demure and mysterious half-glance, Olympia stared brazenly out from the canvas. Her forceful gaze communicated confidence, defiance, and self-possession, which was disarming when paired with her nakedness. The subject matter was also roundly criticized. Manet had painted a common prostitute, not a genteel courtesan, and had made no attempt to conceal this fact. As T. J. Clark has noted, her placement in a comfortably bourgeois setting added to the shocking effect of the painting, and in the figure of Olympia, Manet had successfully bared the social taboos of prostitution, illicit sex and disease, all of which were growing concerns during the second half of the nineteenth century. With this image, Manet had created what he felt was a realistic, honest, depiction of the female body, one that was stripped of the artistic traditions of form and technique, and connected to some of the disconcerting elements of modern life."
(Julie Anne Johnson, 2008)
[Edouard Manet''s Olympia works as a parody of Titian' 'The Venus of Urbino'.]
8. T. J Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Age of Manet and his Followers, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984, 134.
9. Charles Bernheimer, 'Manet's Olympia: The Figuration of Scandal,' Poetics Today, Volume 10, Issue 2, Art & Literature II (Summer 1989): 255-277, 256.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
National Gallery shows the world's oldest profession
"London's National Gallery will be showing the work Hoerengracht, by Ed and Nancy Kienholz, in November next year. The walk-in installation recreates, in meticulous detail, the 'whores' canal' of Amsterdam's (in)famous red light district."
(The Guardian, UK)
CONTRIBUTOR
David RogersonSHARE
