gimme some tongue

Radical sexuality and why sexuality is to liberate us.

| Henna Timanttimetsä

I like both radical and sexuality as words, acts of necessary and something unavoidable we must face and try to understand as essential and natural. Testing how visible perversions are or are not, what is actually perverted and what is not, testing tolerance and sensitivities towards radical and sex via art is important and vital. They, radical and sex, do something when experienced, make us do something to wake up from apathy, liberating feeling of having done something unacceptable but feeling having done something absolutely correct. Sex which is as such pushing the limits of forbidden and bad, which experience is scary, shameful and joyful, enjoyable, to do something forbidden, testing limits of acceptable, what is good taste, what is disgusting, how much your inhibitions give room and what are we afraid of and why. Reactions towards radical are usually fearful and rejecting. To me radical is a word and act of beauty. Today I think radical is too scary to exist in normal every day speech. To declare oneself radical almost equals a terrorist. Excitement, horror and disgust going hand in hand, fears exploring and making sexual and violent imagery bring and what kind of humanity is found. How close animals do we go when we let go of our inhibitions and restrains. Acts that can bring strong emotional reactions: repulsion, rejection, rage, just testing how numb we have become, how do we notice numbness and indifference of ours. Images that try to shock also try to make us think. Shock effect is thereby a necessity and rejuvenating, breaking and tearing, destructive.

Tongue is an instrument. Tongue is pleasurable and it is an insult when shown, to lick something in public is almost a sexual act. So there is something about tongue the organ that is disgusting and dirty, a middle finger inside one’s mouth, what you lick is what you like and you have desire in you. Is it how tongue is used for licking which make us look and feel, used for tasting, for speaking, for showing, for kissing: what mouth stands for. An expressive hole in which we put food to eat, which we use to give affection, something which can be shut and opened to speak, sigh, whisper, yell, scream. Mouth which is the most personal tool of self-expression, love, contempt, communication, drinking and eating for us to live. Tongue out is a sign of something bad, abnormal behaviour and a rude gesture. It has ugliness as it is so bare and a piece of meat yet very sensitive and complex, tender and not easy to look at and accept as anything other than very personal and a message of ill. When tongue is pictured without beautifying it, it is very unapologetic, without need to please, maybe even without gender and age. Tongue between fingers is a sexual gesture, signifying oral sex. Why would anybody make such a gesture would be to humiliate. Humiliation is a way to use power when someone is ashamed of sexuality, loss of privacy and it is almost an act of rape. Humiliation and oppression via sex is the easiest way to torture and put down, take away pride, dignity and purity. Why I do such explicit pictures is to make visible something of how we use power and how someone who by her gender does not have much power can show her strength or weakness which often comes to show via sexuality. Also to study humiliation as a strategy which has no end but is built-in us through our shame. Humiliation which is senseless, insensitive, irrational and cruel.
How much we have negative emotions in our mouths and what we choose to give. And what mouth and tongue mean, stand for and has meant in search for symptoms of diseases and personality. What is ill, is this picture sick or am I? Art is a gesture and research but often viewers look for pathology of an artist which most part is wrong and partly of course artist puts herself in her work.

 

Something called every girl’s dream. What is it exactly?

| Henna Timanttimetsä

I too adore the idea of beautiful weightless ballet dancers to some extent. I love the effort they see to achieve the easiness and beauty of their craft. So why is it a bourgeois art, doesn’t it speak for all? Ballet is so-called high art, which is about princesses and princes with manners, costumes, settings, choreography, funding, competition. It does exclude from the beginning a lot of people, all of high art is exclusive. What happens for the art, which likes to linger in the past and have a sense of closed society? Question is does high-art evolve and is it a belonging of someone and what kind of purpose does it serve? Does it repeat something that cannot be or is not wanted to be changed? Is it meant to elevate? Same goes of course with the music played for these shows. Crackless bravo.

It is a culturally bound, strictly framed way of expressing love for symmetry, achieving a certain kind of perfection, to be adored as ballerina, as an artist, who does many sacrifices for her art: becomes a swan, moves her arms like a swan.  The art expresses bourgeois longing for harmony, ecstasy, tradition and fantasy world. Women as flawless floating beings expressing all this.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/78263/ballet-over article Is ballet over by Jennifer Homans for The New republic 2010
“The ubiquitous presence of reconstructors, notators, and directors—ballet’s curators and conservators—rather than choreographers is further evidence of this obsession with preservation. London’s Royal Ballet and New York’s American Ballet Theatre have both devoted vast resources in recent years to new productions of The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake. Even the New York City Ballet, vanguard of modernism, now has its own full-length productions of these nineteenth-century classics with new but blandly conventional choreography.”