Anna Schober

Pornography and Avantgarde: on the mutual linkage of images

Since the French Revolution and increasingly since the avant-garde movements of the 1910s and the 1960s, artists are using pornographic images in order to break taboos and to renounce conventional (image) conventions. At the same time, their works contribute to a re-definition of sexuality and of the “legitimate” images associated with it. These artists employ avant-garde aesthetic tricks and the popworlds of pornography, bringing very “mixed” aesthetic arrangements into the social space. Their interventions stimulated various stories involving fascination and/or revulsion, which this research project reconstructed in form of a plural genealogy. The research focused on the mutual linkage between supposedly different images and perceptions.
Anna Schober