Last of the pornotopians
Sep. 12th, 2006 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus"Explicit sexual imagery has erupted in every medium and on every surface. While there's plenty of laughing and pointing going on, hardly anyone has stopped to consider its impact." So runs the headline above the 2004 article that gives design writer Rick Poynor's new collection its title: Designing Pornotopia: Travels in Visual Culture. As a bit of a pornotopian myself, I thought I'd read it naked.
Very little of the book, it turns out, is about sex. This collection of journalism (most of it originally appeared in magazines like Eye, Print, Trace and ID) is a bit like Roland Barthes' "Mythologies" in the way it invests each twitch of pop culture -- from Bjork's homogenic neck brace through the covers of every edition of Ballard's "Crash" to the resurgence of gardening allotments -- with thoughtful attention.
The Britain of Poynor's book emerges as a bulimic, orgiastic place, a right-wing, post-Thatcherite parody of the ugly underbelly of the Sexual Revolution and the Me Generation. Poynor could be talking about himself when he describes illustrator Paul Davies' particular form of misanthropy as "the stance of someone struggling with dismay at the way people so often fall short of their potential to live good lives, behave decently and tell the truth".
Instead of owlish wisdom, we have magpie eyes. "We show no sign of abandoning our addiction to magazines," Poynor writes in an essay called This Month's Cover. "For sheer concentration of imagery in one place, there is no experience quite like going into a shop with a large selection of titles. At first sight your eye is overwhelmed by hundreds of shiny, brightly coloured rectangles, each one vibrating with pictures and lines of type. In a consumer society, we inhabit a ceaseless flow of images, coming at us at all times and from all directions, but nothing else has quite this degree of simultaneity: a field of competing attractions, in which all elements are equally present and vivid."
I'd almost compare Poynor's style to Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry. He somehow manages to state the obvious in ways which allow us to see it afresh, using each formulation as a springboard to thoughts we wouldn't otherwise have. For instance, it's clear that I've pinned "hundreds of shiny, brightly coloured rectangles" to my living room wall in an attempt to emulate exactly the kind of dense consumer environment that Poynor is talking about. I'm a magpie too.
"The problem with covers is you end up trying to catch the floating readers," Poynor quotes Robin Derrick, art director of British Vogue, as saying. "You ignore the 100,000 who buy the magazine every month and target the 200,000 who occasionally buy it." Suddenly it becomes clear why the British Labour Party is led by a conservative and the British Conservative Party by someone currently making every effort to appeal to environmentalists and anti-war activists. They're magazine covers.
Poynor's underlying, unifying attitude in Designing Pornotopia is an undercurrent of approval (or nostalgia) for old-fashioned British reticence -- and its corollary, a weary distaste for the brash, raunchy place Britain has become. Interviewing artist-illustrator Paul Davies, Poynor finds that "in other more private and emotional matters, which I hadn't asked about, he was almost too forthcoming". It's precisely this sort of interest in reticence which made Poynor (who used to be my mentor when we both blogged regularly at Design Observer) send me the book. He'd read my essay on The Century of the Self, with its tentative endorsement of repressed values like "guilt, repression, class consciousness, elitism, traditional society, duty, restraint, decorum, bottling things up, deferred gratification, introversion".
"I find myself thinking a lot about the old idea of corruption," Poynor wrote to me in an e-mail (quoted here with his permission) after reading my piece about The Century of the Self and The Queen. "We pay no heed to the possibility that individuals are corruptible... That you can cross a line. That you might have to struggle with yourself not to cross it. We believe you can and should say yes to anything if it's your thing. Because you want it. Because you're worth it. I think we've lost sight of a fundamental psychological, moral and social truth. Unrestrained libidinal excess as played out, promoted and amplified in the media seems to have led not to the promised utopian liberation but to a horrible kind of callousness and affectlessness (and stupidity), which the market cynically exploits. I think you'll probably detect more than a few strains of all this in the book."
Hmm, think I'll just slip into some clothes.
Very little of the book, it turns out, is about sex. This collection of journalism (most of it originally appeared in magazines like Eye, Print, Trace and ID) is a bit like Roland Barthes' "Mythologies" in the way it invests each twitch of pop culture -- from Bjork's homogenic neck brace through the covers of every edition of Ballard's "Crash" to the resurgence of gardening allotments -- with thoughtful attention.
The Britain of Poynor's book emerges as a bulimic, orgiastic place, a right-wing, post-Thatcherite parody of the ugly underbelly of the Sexual Revolution and the Me Generation. Poynor could be talking about himself when he describes illustrator Paul Davies' particular form of misanthropy as "the stance of someone struggling with dismay at the way people so often fall short of their potential to live good lives, behave decently and tell the truth".
Instead of owlish wisdom, we have magpie eyes. "We show no sign of abandoning our addiction to magazines," Poynor writes in an essay called This Month's Cover. "For sheer concentration of imagery in one place, there is no experience quite like going into a shop with a large selection of titles. At first sight your eye is overwhelmed by hundreds of shiny, brightly coloured rectangles, each one vibrating with pictures and lines of type. In a consumer society, we inhabit a ceaseless flow of images, coming at us at all times and from all directions, but nothing else has quite this degree of simultaneity: a field of competing attractions, in which all elements are equally present and vivid."
I'd almost compare Poynor's style to Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry. He somehow manages to state the obvious in ways which allow us to see it afresh, using each formulation as a springboard to thoughts we wouldn't otherwise have. For instance, it's clear that I've pinned "hundreds of shiny, brightly coloured rectangles" to my living room wall in an attempt to emulate exactly the kind of dense consumer environment that Poynor is talking about. I'm a magpie too."The problem with covers is you end up trying to catch the floating readers," Poynor quotes Robin Derrick, art director of British Vogue, as saying. "You ignore the 100,000 who buy the magazine every month and target the 200,000 who occasionally buy it." Suddenly it becomes clear why the British Labour Party is led by a conservative and the British Conservative Party by someone currently making every effort to appeal to environmentalists and anti-war activists. They're magazine covers.
Poynor's underlying, unifying attitude in Designing Pornotopia is an undercurrent of approval (or nostalgia) for old-fashioned British reticence -- and its corollary, a weary distaste for the brash, raunchy place Britain has become. Interviewing artist-illustrator Paul Davies, Poynor finds that "in other more private and emotional matters, which I hadn't asked about, he was almost too forthcoming". It's precisely this sort of interest in reticence which made Poynor (who used to be my mentor when we both blogged regularly at Design Observer) send me the book. He'd read my essay on The Century of the Self, with its tentative endorsement of repressed values like "guilt, repression, class consciousness, elitism, traditional society, duty, restraint, decorum, bottling things up, deferred gratification, introversion".
"I find myself thinking a lot about the old idea of corruption," Poynor wrote to me in an e-mail (quoted here with his permission) after reading my piece about The Century of the Self and The Queen. "We pay no heed to the possibility that individuals are corruptible... That you can cross a line. That you might have to struggle with yourself not to cross it. We believe you can and should say yes to anything if it's your thing. Because you want it. Because you're worth it. I think we've lost sight of a fundamental psychological, moral and social truth. Unrestrained libidinal excess as played out, promoted and amplified in the media seems to have led not to the promised utopian liberation but to a horrible kind of callousness and affectlessness (and stupidity), which the market cynically exploits. I think you'll probably detect more than a few strains of all this in the book."
Hmm, think I'll just slip into some clothes.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-11 10:15 pm (UTC)...I don't know which magazine, however
Date: 2006-09-11 10:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-11 10:39 pm (UTC)http://community.livejournal.com/foto_decadent/1403878.html
or
http://www.voguevanity.it/cont/010fas/photo/default.asp
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-11 11:19 pm (UTC)I can't wait for the "Sexy Jihadi v/s Yankee Stewardess" photoshoot.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:20 am (UTC)Superb, even.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 09:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 09:27 am (UTC)Are you a yank?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 06:07 pm (UTC)I don't think it was created to capture any zeitgeist; I think it's all about being as transgressive as possible, in order to get a rise out of the jaded hipsters who have become bored with last month's spread of BDSM fashion photos in an AIDS ward in Africa, or some such. It's an end-game -- "how can we shock 'em next?" Rather pathetic, really.
Am I a yank? Only by birth. I consider myself a multi-national.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 09:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-13 02:25 am (UTC)If you do like the spread, I apologize for my critical remarks. Personally, I find terrorist chic and images glamorizing the mistreatment of the vulnerable to be pretty unconscionable -- especially since they're not doing it for purely artistic intent, but to rather to sell product. But that's only one person's opinion; I certainly don't expect everyone to agree.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-14 03:25 am (UTC)slip the mozaiku back on
Date: 2006-09-11 10:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-11 11:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-11 11:52 pm (UTC)Am I being a pedant if I point out the eye-patch?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 01:07 am (UTC)I have a lot of respect for someone like Frank Zappa, but he just didn't get it. He was an intelligent, civilized person with refined taste. So, he figured naively: pornography and cursing doesn't bother me, I don't see why it should be frowned upon in society. Unfortunately, Frank didn't consider how the ad execs and the proletarians would embrace it. So now that society has been "liberated", you can't walk down the street without being bombarded by the most base advertisements and music. It's not that there isn't a time and place for erotic or unusual art, but it needn't have been dropped into the hands of irresponsible corporations and the dim-witted public.
Here's some fantastic pornographic art:
http://www.cypherpress.com/beardsley/underthehill/chapter1.asp
-henryperri
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 12:40 pm (UTC)Who speaks like that?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 02:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 05:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 01:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 02:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 02:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 02:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 03:21 am (UTC)I don't mind sexuality being on covers, pornography-style songs or whatever. I just mind that there's always a sense of guilt, a desire to slip it all under the rug. "This is really bad...a guilty pleasure! Buy it! Your parents would be ashamed!"
I'm concerned that raunch is keeping Westerners from looking at eroticism with the right glasses on. We need to de-guiltify erotic entertainment and advertising, but to develop the right attitude about eroticism, we need to remove the unhealthy attitude that entertainment and advertising perpetuate. I guess it's one of those "Catch-22's."
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 03:41 am (UTC)(Actually, some are catching up with me. American Apparel's advertising seems to understand the genuinely erotic.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:20 am (UTC)generally, i find there ads very effective, and their products sensuously comfortable! suddenly the thought of socks and underwear for christmas turns me on something fierce!
must say though...some of those A.A. back cover of Vice ads kinda cross the taste line...as in this issue's photo of a girl named Erica wearing a micro-mesh bodysuit, shot from an up-the-crotch P.O.V.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:48 pm (UTC)There's something too intimate about them (and I find the girls look much younger than the air-brushed-to-death Maxim super babes, like "Jessica" from www.americanapparel.net/gallery/photocollections/models/index.html)
American Apparel also used a real porn star in their ads.
-Monique
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:15 am (UTC)American Apparel is very unusual in that it's a company run by someone who's (notoriously) genuinely into sex for its own sake, and that that actually shows in the company's advertising and so on. And it's very interesting to me that Dov is a Canadian, and that many of his models are Mexican. In other words, there's something off-centre about his operation, something un-American, despite the name.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 04:57 pm (UTC)American Apparels are pretty rampant. In Montreal there seemed to be one on every street. They are pretty mainstream now too - they open in the big-box shopping malls now, right next to Victoria's Secret and Cinnabon.
-Monique
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:29 am (UTC)If this photo session has saved one life, it has been worth it..
Date: 2006-09-12 09:19 am (UTC)When I looked at the cover of that book I am reminded of what the pornification of my community college collection of creative works and writing from 1990 looked like- it seems the artwork which won the place for the cover, (in only black and white) was reminicent of this only perhaps even a bit more explicit-
Personally I was kind of bored with this; most of my best mates in school won places based upon the sexuality of their messages not so subtlely hidden in their designs- a friend won his scholarship to the School of the Art Institute bassed upon a huge ceramic penis sculpture.. we had a serious laugh about it when it a prototype of it was fired in the kiln and it exploded... it was all "dammit, William's penis exploded all over the kiln breaking everything with it..." and as heart breaking as that was, it was damned funny.. it was possibly the first time I said "penis" without flinching... or turning red.
a bit off topic..
Date: 2006-09-12 09:38 am (UTC)...hmmmm. that shot is so 'L'Homme A Trois Mains'
eDwin
Re: a bit off topic..
Date: 2006-09-12 10:33 am (UTC)You know, something was nagging at the corner of my mind, something it looked like. And yes, you've hit it. It's that Katerine cover.
i'm in london for this week and paris for the following two. any momus appearances in these cities by any chance?
No, just Berlin Schokoladen on September 27th and Barcelona Kosmopolis Festival on October 20th.
Poynor
Date: 2006-09-12 10:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 10:24 am (UTC)can we have a close up of the cd shelves?
the porn-opticon
Date: 2006-09-12 03:38 pm (UTC)Re: the porn-opticon
Date: 2006-09-12 05:28 pm (UTC)Re: the porn-opticon
Date: 2006-09-12 08:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 08:15 pm (UTC)Also, I almost had a heart attack because of the sheer unselfconscious attractiveness of that first photograph. I am an incorrigibly shallow person.
Porn Life
Date: 2006-09-12 08:42 pm (UTC)So we have a pidgin language that is click-shared by millions, limited, functional and lucrative. And how limited. Pornographic fantasy is solipsistic and clichéd but evidently addictive. Corruption is important here. Pornography is to sex as sex is to love. Do we want to be defined by porn or love?
I find momus sexy because
Date: 2006-09-13 11:27 am (UTC)Re: Porn Life
Date: 2006-09-13 11:34 am (UTC)Are they mutually exclusive? I love porn. Why can't I have porn and love at the same time? hmmm I love porn.