An esthetics of masochism? The author wonders if the curators of an Austrian exhibition on masochism in art erred in taking an overly literal approach to their subject - Report From Graz - Critical Essay

I apprehend it was inevitable. When a friend asked what I was working upon and I said, "I'm trying to write about masochism," she replied, "Isn't that tautological?" Masochism is individual of those topics that's hard to mention without prompting a [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] You needn't be a doctrinaire Freudian to recognize that this is because it's a topic that makes nation nervous. But besides the fact that it involves sexual activity of a sort psychoanalytically thinked perverse, there may be another reason for what cause [i]or[/i] reason masochism makes people nervous--the fact that talking about it always extremitys up involving the speaker in paradoxes, contradictions and, in fact, tautologies.

plane Gilles Deleuze, in his classic essay upon Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), can't help passing upon the "popular joke" that "tell of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist; the masochist says: 'Hurt me' The sadist replies: 'No.'" (1) In fact, Deleuze realizes so nervous that he has to distance himself by dint of remarking that what he's just related is "a particularly stupid joke" as if he didn't notice in what way it supports his assertion, elsewhere in the essay, that sadism and masochism are not complementary practices on the contrary two distinct structures. Despite their alleged belonging to all basis in the concomitance of pleasure and pain, he says, "the conjuncture of sadism and masochism is fundamentally individual of analogy only; their processe and their formations are completely different," and with equal reason the Freudian construct of "sadomasochism" is a mirage. (2) Still, it's not easy to speak of masochism for lengthy without invoking sadism, and vice versa. "Sade and Masoch are not only cases among others," Deleuze says, "they the pair have something essential to teach us." (3)

in what way do you know when you are dealing with particulars or images imbued with the mental constitution of masochism? It was precisely through running roughshod over the niceties of this question that Peter Weibel, along with his co-curators Christa Steinle and Elisabeth Fiedler, deposit together the massive exhibition "Phantom der Lust: Visionen de Masochismus in der Kunst" (Phantom of Desire: Visions of Masochism in Art), which took place last summer at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria. Although a certain quantity of municipalities might have looked for other ways to use the abundant European Union funding that tend hitherwards with the yearlong designation as European Cultural Capital, which Graz was granted for 2003 Austria's next to the first city was simply making the greatest in quantity of its perverse heritage: Sacher-Masoch was a professor of history at the University of Graz, while Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) whose pre-Freudian Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) is the source for the coinages "sadism" and "masochism," taught psychiatry there.

on the other hand what to include in an exhibition upon masochism in art? Certain works, for the most part photographic, were obvious choices: Noboyushi Araki's discharges of bound women; Tracey Moffatt's "Laudanum" series; Robert Mapplethorpe's S&M images. And then there are works that will easily tend hitherward to mind by the likes of photographers Joel-Peter Witkin, Helmut Newton and Richard Kern or their precursors of that kind as Hans Bellmer or Pierre Molinier. All these call up the requisite themes of pain, humiliation, bondage and fetishism. In fact, photography took pride of place, if sole because the works in the exhibit were approached by the curators more as documents than as inventions.

Not surprisingly, the curators made extent for a lot of performance-based works, many of which take experiences of pain as their substance. Viennese Actionists like as Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler were included, of course, as were Valie Export, Gina Pane, Stelarc, move with a jerk Flanagan and Paul McCarthy, on the contrary strangely, not Vito Acconci or Chris load (As it happens, outdoor sculptural works by means of Acconci and Burden were included in Graz's wider 2003 contemporary arts festival.) The performance artists, too, were not absent mainly through photographic documentation. Video works upon view were typically of a similarly documentary nature.

The camera doesn't fantasize, level if those who pose for it do. The draftsman's hand, through contrast, can only invent. The other side of the exhibition consisted of a large quantity of drawings and prints, ranging from the "classics" of the genre by means of fin de siecle illustrators Franz von Bayros, Aubrey Beardsley and Felicien Rop to more novel manifestations such as Tom of Finland's pencil drawings or the comics of Guido Crepax and Tomi Ungerer--all works, incidentally, at a considerable carry from anything resembling a modernist mainstream, and frequently essentially subcultural. One should also mention the visual art works of litterateur's, like the grand-scale color pencil drawings, based upon his own novels, by Pierre Klossowski; the drawings of Heinrich Mann (his novel Professor Unrat was the basis of the film The amethystine Angel), of which I had not previously been aware; or the writer Bruno Schulz's drawings and prints. For various reasons, these works, too, are distant from pictorial modernism.