ANNE UDDENBERG
The Clip, 16x52x60cm, fiberglass, aqua resin and spray filler, 2015.
AARON RATAJCZYK
Leto with Vase, c-print, 2018.
(with Alexandra Koumantaki and Dimitris Gketsis posing)
STUART SANDFORD
Sebastian, life size porcelan figure, 2018.
YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP
Young Boy Dancing Group 2017, shredded underwear with printed labels, 2017.
METASITU
<3 FROM ATHENS, engraved sample containers and semen, 2018.
MARIA METSALU
Mademoiselle x (IV), Eucalypyus, blood and fire, 2018.
KAROL RADZISZEWSKI
AIDS series, poster, 66,8cm x 66,8cm, 2012-onwards.
DREW LINT
Dionysian Mystery, fruit, lights and fog, 2018.
KARIM BOUMJIMAR
Byssus hairs, c-print of hand-drawn illustration, 2017.
JULIAN-JAKOB KNEER
Pole, weathered paint on lathed wood, 2018.
A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF LOVE SEX
What is the relationship, and more precisely, the proximity, of sex to love and vice versa?
As far as the entanglements of this duality are concerned, we often tuck away the more uncomfortable physicality of sex and instead concentrate on its spiritual, emotional and psychological dimension as love. Regardless of the geographically diverse cultures that we have inherited from past generations, sex and love are rarely viewed as integral parts of one another, even though most of us would agree that the two cannot be easily separated. The material and fleshly aspects of love-sex, like attraction and its constitution, and even more so, the physical contact between bodies and their exchange of fluids, due to their moral and religious implications, have caused love-sex to be summarized in the former and imagined mostly as an immaterial entity exchanged between minds rather than bodies.
To support this distorted and sexless concept of love, humans have fabricated various metaphysical justifications for their physical desires, dressing them up as modest spiritual yearnings and something beyond the body. This conception is owed especially to Abrahamic religions, specifically Christianity, which gave rise to ideas of courtly love and women as heavenly figures. Present in the works of late medieval authors such as Dante and Petrarch, the desexualization of love and dematerialization of the female body were later developed in the 19th century as the basis of romantic love and the apology for monogamous and idealized relationships. In the Islamic world, the metaphysical subsumption of love-sex is mostly accomplished through the different shades of Sufism. While adding queer ambiguity to the normally heterosexual understanding of affection, Sufism makes love even more sexless, divine and thus less material, and leaves in its trace an unspoken and non-discursive practice of sex in the black box of mysticism.
Needless to say, the materiality of love cannot be summarized only in sexual affection and bodily actions even though they might be its primary substrate. Resting above the abjection associated with sex, are the thousands of volumes of prose and poetry written on love and billions of hours spent by millions of humans thinking about the subject which themselves are another another aspect of its materiality. However, we need to keep in mind that except in minor discursive and cognitive traditions, which foregrounded sex in relation to love, most of what was thought, said and written about affection have often pointed away from the physical and sexual and instead towards the spiritual and romantic aspects of love.
It is as if somewhere along history, love and sex were first separated but then quickly patched back together as the yin and yang of the necessities of human reproduction and psychological health. More recently, modernity and capitalism slowly separated sex from love but not love from sex; in this updated configuration, one can have sex without love but not the other way around. In order to preserve the protection of property, love would stay with sex but sex as sex would be separated to be commodified as a newly legitimized labor of the body. Under late capitalism and cybernetic neoliberalism, unlike what is commonly believed, love is not dead or killed by the weight of the mathematical significance of life, but is pulverized and collapsed back into sex. The atomization of love subjects it to physical and material guarantees which only sex can deliver. Coinciding with the rise of AI, this process of dismantling and recalibrating is actually where the potential for a new configuration of love-sex as a continuum lies.
by Mohammad Salemy
NBDBKP
The Wonders of Me, four imprinted 5mm acrylic plates, 60x40cm each, 2018.
PAUL-ALEXANDRE ISLAS
self portrait as a horny person in the sauna 💔, image on phone, 2018
text reads: "StéphaneGrindr: Monte c'est au troisieme je t'attends" (Come up it's on the third i'm waiting for you)
LUKAS HOFMANN AND HARA SHAKO KIRI
Untitled, melted black wax on body, 2018.
GREGORY BLUNT
Untitled, c-print, 2018.
FRITZ MARLON SCHIFFERS
Title, video still, 2018.
BB, 1m40s, 2018.
for more information: gregoryphilipblunt(at)gmail.com
all images © 2018 anightinalexander.gr