THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ANSWERS WE FIND WITH OUR PUSSIES
On the occasion of the publication of Libidoc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (Maska, 2005), the author Katrien Jacobs and artist Marijs Boulogne engaged in a unique interactive conversation about sex, love, death and ecstasy. Marijs Boulogne is a Belgian artist who taps into the lost (Flemish) histories of female ecstasy and cults of martyrdom and sexuality. Through obsessive actions, awkward ritualistic abstinence, and a strange physical desire to meet and marry the highest unknown, Boulogne’s characters desire to find erotic contact with God. Katrien Jacobs will initiate a dialogue with Boulogne and the audience in order to discuss and understand the most powerful sex drive of the artist, to test out the intimate play of bodies and public codes of sex, death and fantasy.
Questions raised by members of the audience were be answered by Jacobs and Boulogne. For example: Are artists hyper-sensing varieties of sexual desire as a result of biological-cultural growth, or are they drenched in sexual data through the mass media? Can sex art best be approached with our evolving animal instinct, or do we need a cultural-historical erotic education? Can we build ‘soft’ social spaces to unblock desire and tackle the climate of fear? What is the relationship between sexual desire and a longing to transcend materiality through contact with ‘unknown’ abject entities or processes of death and deterioration?
Katrien Jacobs, the author of Libidoc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art, initiates a dual narrative in the personae of Libidot and Dr.Jacobs. Libidot travels and has overtly sympathetic, even intoxicated, subliminal reactions to the research subjects, while Dr. Jacobs is locked inside an office and responds to the works with detached cynicism. Their subjects, and the subject of the book, are twenty-seven leading contemporary artists, whose work explicitly or subtly touches upon human sexuality and pornographic representation.
Katrien Jacobs
