scaarebabe

Advertisements for Oneida Silverware, made by members of the polyamorous Victorian Oneida Community. The Oneida Community “was designed for the pursuit of love and the encouragement of sexual pleasure. Intercourse, according to Noyes, should be an ‘innocent and useful communion,’ a ‘joyful act of fellowship,’ and a ‘purely social affair,’ comparable to a stroll in the park, a conversation, or a dance, differing from these pursuits only in its superior intensity and beauty. In a society trained to Noyes’ principles, intercourse would take its place among the fine arts. Indeed, it would rank above music, painting, and sculpture, for it combined ‘the charms and benefits of them all.’” (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/flesh/reinventing-sex)

Photos from the August 14, 2003 Northeast Blackout (source)

The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet (1949)

Jean Jacques Lequeu, Et nous aussi nous serons meres (1794)

Shunga, traditional Japanese erotic art (shunga, literally 'spring pictures'), was produced from 1600 to 1900 and banned in Japan for much of the 20th century. 

“A ‘lover's eye’ miniature is a painted miniature of the giver's eye, presented to a loved one. The notion accompanying this very short lived fad (c.1790 through 1820) was that the eye would be recognizable only to the recipient and could therefore be worn publicly keeping the lover's identity a secret. In contradiction however, portraits from the period rarely show the sitter overtly wearing or holding an eye miniature thereby perhaps indicating that the wearers concealed these intimate portraits from view to further guard their secrecy.” (source)

Duchamp worked secretly on the piece from 1946 to 1966 in his Greenwich Village studio. It is composed of an old wooden door, nails, bricks, brass, aluminum sheet, steel binder clips, velvet, leaves, twigs, a female form made of parchment, hair, glass, plastic clothespins, oil paint, linoleum, an assortment of lights, a landscape composed of hand-painted and photographed elements and an electric motor housed in a cookie tin which rotates a perforated disc. The Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, Duchamp's girlfriend from 1946 to 1951, served as the model for the female figure in the piece, and his second wife, Alexina (Teeny), served as the model for the figure's arm. Duchamp prepared a "Manual of Instructions" in a 4-ring binder explaining and illustrating how to assemble and disassemble the piece.

‘Hidden Noise.’ Kathryn Cowles. Wood, cloth, paper, twine, thread, furniture, building materials, body. 2017

Installation view of Portia Munson’s Pink Project; Bedroom, 1994-2018, at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2018. Photography by Steven Probert.

In the Boudoir (Scena galante) by Juan Pablo Salinas (1871-1946)