Re: <nettime> Torture as pornography

[axel vogelsang <axel_vogelsang@gmx.de>]

Interesting article, that. I read it before I went to a club night in the
ICA in London last night. A brasilian band was playing. As a backdrop they
screened footage of the carneval parade in Bahia. Girls and boys dancing,
scarcely clad, women smiling while they were shaking their bare breasts
towards the camera. Then there was this woman who suddenly lost her tiny
little bra. With a smile and an elegant gesture she put it back on.
Instantly the director was showing this scene again in slo-mo, the
commentator's comments subtitled on the bottom. It was just as if it was a
football match and they were quickly reviewing an interesting tackle before
they moved on back to the live action. It wasn't really something they found
worth dwelling over for more than a few seconds. Suddenly I had a flashback
reminding me of the MTV awards and nipplegate where the exposure of a
squareinch of human flesh led to a hysteria that seemed to have traumatised
millions of people in the States. It gets even more absurd now on the
backdrop of the revelations that the soldiers that are fighting for the
values of those upright citicens were at the same time torturing Iraky
prisoners and photographing them in poses "reminiscent of sadomasochistic
porn"...

> Trying to deal with The Pictures, the fact that women
> were obviously very involved (and enjoying what they
> did), wanting to figure out what this means for our
> understanding the system of meaning & sighns [nice typo,
> I leave it in]
> and trying to grip why I instinctively insisted on
> keeping them pictures away from my children, this
> Guardian article helped me on track.
> gr
> eveline 
 <...>

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net