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Photograph by Peter Gorman
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A Letter From Us |
For being part of a culture so obsessed with our own bodies, we sure don’t know them very well. Of course, we know how to remove or add hair, gain or lose weight, tan or de-pigmentize our skin, and we even know how to physiologically change our gender. Yet despite all the advances we make in our efforts to alter our physical appearance, we have grown little in our relationship to our bodies. In fact, most of us have a relationship with our bodies the way we have a relationship with our most hated co-worker: we’ll acknowledge their presence, but do everything possible to avoid interacting with them. On the subject of sex, we usually keep our friends at the same arms-length we often hold our enemies at. We don’t know about you, but most of our friends are more willing and able to endlessly talk about the most radical and controversial of subjects than they are able to talk about the most basic details of their sex lives without blushing, giggling or quickly changing the subject. |
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This disconnect between sexuality and the rest of our lives extends beyond personal connections to the public sphere as well. In this very issue—an issue devoted entirely to nudity, art and eroticism—the fact that we cannot print any pictures that contain images of genitals or assholes makes no sense. After all, we all have them. The two main reasons given for this are that we may offend some overly sensitive and/or moralistic adults and that our publication might end up in the hands of a minor. That we might offend some adults is beyond our control; if an adult has lived this long without pondering the meaning of sex in his life or the life of our society, then it is high time for him to start growing up and learning about himself and others. That we might come before the eyes of a minor is frankly not so worrisome to us either. If a kid can pick up a magazine like this that not only shows titillating photographs, but also aims to put those photographs in artistic, historical and social contexts, then we have probably done more to help educate that kid in sexuality and art than any high school could ever dream of. (Besides, there’s not a teen alive who hasn’t handled a “Playboy” and the contextualization of the photos in there is a bit scant.) But as much as we’d like to have no restrictions on our efforts to produce some intelligently considered smut, these issues can be overlooked only to our legal and financial detriment—something a struggling publication can’t, in fact, overlook. But at least we do show some breasts.
The art in this issue—featured in “The New Nudes: Artists Amassing a Body of Work”—are all done by artists willing to laugh at sexuality, titillate the viewers, and shock us. Filmmaker John Waters wrote in his book “Art: A Sex Book,” “In terms of sex and contemporary art, humour—as much as gall and nerve—is incredibly important.” But good art that shocks or provokes us also eventually mellows into deeper thought and examination of what the artist was intending to convey. In other words, photographs of sex acts may be pornography, but if done well, they also force us to examine ourselves in relationship to our own bodies and serve to teach us new ways of looking at sexuality—both our own and that of others. Good sexual art turns us on, but no matter the subject, great art enlightens us and leads us to a place we never had been before seeing it. And as long as our brains are still functioning, we can’t imagine a better place to go.
Love, Tablet
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