Drawing a Line between Pornography and Art
Irwin's talent for radically altering pornography makes it nearly impossible to differentiate between painting, drawing and photography, resulting in dreamy and ephemeral puzzles that keep us intrigued for much longer than a page out of a dirty magazine ever could. See a selection of the Kentucky-born artist's work here and let us know your thoughts on the reinvented renderings in the comments.
Pornography ancient Drawing Erotic lust China Body Art old Scroll painting
Dildos sometimes lead to feminist discovery in pornography. In one work, The Progress of Nature: Exemplified in the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Roger Lovejoy (1744), adolescent girls find a dildo in an aunt’s bedchamber and spend pages deliberating its purpose. Drawing on a centuries-old European tradition of prostitute dialogues, in which an experienced bawd trains an initiate in the arts of sexual commerce, the more experienced explains genitals and sex toys to her innocent friend Polly. They acknowledge the penis as a source of power and ambition, and observe that the dildo – strong, erect and durable – in some ways resembles it. The penis ‘is that arbitrary he that enters his Dominions, and ravages far and wide … in the Gratification of his Pleasures. He plunges Headlong into all the Recesses, demanding every thing, denied of nothing, enjoying and bestowing every Rapture.’ Patriarchal right, so far, originates in men’s sexual power.
ritish pornographers experimented with philosophy piecemeal, floating potentially transformative ideas, then retreating. By contrast, French pornography, written in the decades leading to the Revolution, produced politically disciplined theories of personal liberty. While French pornography’s libertines promoted the unabashed fulfilment desire in enclosures like convents and chateaus, British pornography experimented with sex as it befell unremarkable characters (often inexperienced adolescents) in quotidian environments – gardens, parks, brothels, bedchambers, drawing rooms, taverns. In these proximate contexts, sex acts took on significance as everyday encounters available for consideration by an increasingly wide swath of readers, as print and literacy became more accessible. And as readers developed tighter affiliations with books, pornographers pulled together, in a slapdash manner, various threads of philosophy that could be tested against sexual experience, reimagining pornography’s lessons.
