feeling looking, dual channel 35mm slide projection, 162 slides, dimensions variable, installed in Bodies of Love at gr_und gallery, Berlin, 2023

Laura Marks, Video Haptics and Erotics, 1998

Haptic perception is usually defined as the combination of tactile, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive functions, the way we experience touch both on the surface of and inside our bodies. In haptic visuality, the eyes themselves function like organs of touch…Haptic images are erotic regardless of their content, because they construct an intersubjective relationship between beholder and image. The viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, engage with the traces the image leaves.

The Catholic Church, The Council of Trent, 1563

figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting…lust

C. P. Cavafy, This, 1913

In this lewd photograph sold privately
(out of police sight) on the street,
in this obscene photograph,
I never imagined I would find
such an otherworldly beauty.
How did you arrive here?

C. P. Cavafy, In the Entrance of the Cafe, 1915

Something someone beside me said
drew my attention to the cafe entrance.
And I saw such a beautiful body there
it seemed too-clever Eros himself had
teasingly shaped its eye-pleasing limbs,
brought the sculpture to its full height,
gently molded contours of the face
and left, with a touch of his hands,
tenderness in the eyes, on the brow and lips.

Richard Dyer, Don’t Look Now: The Instabilities of the Male Pin-Up, 1996

The excessive, even hysterical quality of so much male imagery. The clenched fists, the bulging muscles, the hardened jaws, the proliferation of phallic symbols – they are all straining after what can be hardly achieved, the embodiment of the phallic mystique.