I consider it was inevitable.

I consider it was inevitable. When a friend asked what I was working forward and I said, "I'm trying to write about masochism," she replied, "Isn't that tautological?" Masochism is individual of those topics that's hard to mention without prompting a witticism You needn't be a doctrinaire Freudian to recognize that this is because it's a topic that makes the community nervous. But besides the fact that it involves sexual activity of a sort psychoanalytically fancyed perverse, there may be another reason to what end masochism makes people nervous--the fact that talking about it always lasts up involving the speaker in paradoxes, contradictions and, in fact, tautologies.

flat Gilles Deleuze, in his classic essay forward Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895), can't help passing upon the "popular joke" that "tell of the meeting between a sadist and a masochist; the masochist says: 'Hurt me' The sadist replies: 'No.'" (1) In fact, Deleuze earns so nervous that he has to distance himself by the agency of remarking that what he's just related is "a particularly stupid joke" as if he didn't notice for what cause it supports his assertion, elsewhere in the essay, that sadism and masochism are not complementary practices unless two distinct structures. Despite their alleged used by all basis in the concomitance of pleasure and pain, he says, "the co-operation of sadism and masochism is fundamentally the same of analogy only; their processe and their formations are completely different," and for a like reason the Freudian construct of "sadomasochism" is a mirage. (2) Still, it's not easy to speak of masochism for protracted without invoking sadism, and vice versa. "Sade and Masoch are not solely cases among others," Deleuze says, "they one as well as the other have something essential to teach us." (3)

for what reason do you know when you are dealing with realitys or images imbued with the mental arrangement of parts of masochism? It was precisely by dint of running roughshod over the niceties of this question that Peter Weibel, along with his co-curators Christa Steinle and Elisabeth Fiedler, bring forward together the massive exhibition "Phantom der Lust: Visionen de Masochismus in der Kunst" (Phantom of Desire: Visions of Masochism in Art), which took place last summer at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, Austria. Although a certain quantity of municipalities might have looked for other ways to use the abundant European Union funding that tend hitherwards with the yearlong designation as European Cultural Capital, which Graz was granted for 2003 Austria's other city was simply making the greatest in quantity of its perverse heritage: Sacher-Masoch was a professor of history at the University of Graz, while Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) whose pre-Freudian Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) is the source for the coinages "sadism" and "masochism," taught psychiatry there.

nevertheless what to include in an exhibition upon masochism in art? Certain works, chiefly photographic, were obvious choices: Noboyushi Araki's shooters of bound women; Tracey Moffatt's "Laudanum" series; Robert Mapplethorpe's S&M images. And then there are works that will easily ensue to mind by the likes of photographers Joel-Peter Witkin, Helmut Newton and Richard Kern or their precursors like as Hans Bellmer or Pierre Molinier. All these elicit the requisite themes of pain, humiliation, bondage and fetishism. In fact, photography took pride of place, if merely because the works in the present to view were approached by the curators more as documents than as inventions.

Not surprisingly, the curators made compass for a lot of performance-based works, many of which take experiences of pain as their substance. Viennese Actionists in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as Gunter Brus and Rudolf Schwarzkogler were included, of course, as were Valie Export, Gina Pane, Stelarc, knock Flanagan and Paul McCarthy, nevertheless strangely, not Vito Acconci or Chris cargo (As it happens, outdoor sculptural works by dint of Acconci and Burden were included in Graz's wider 2003 contemporary arts festival.) The performance artists, too, were at hand mainly through photographic documentation. Video works forward view were typically of a similarly documentary nature.

The camera doesn't fantasize, steady if those who pose for it do. The draftsman's hand, by the agency of contrast, can only invent. The other side of the exhibition consisted of a large quantity of drawings and prints, ranging from the "classics" of the genre on fin de siecle illustrators Franz von Bayros, Aubrey Beardsley and Felicien Rop to more new manifestations such as Tom of Finland's pencil drawings or the comics of Guido Crepax and Tomi Ungerer--all works, incidentally, at a considerable take out from anything resembling a modernist mainstream, and ofttimes essentially subcultural. One should also mention the visual art works of litterateur's, like the grand-scale color pencil drawings, based upon his own novels, by Pierre Klossowski; the drawings of Heinrich Mann (his novel Professor Unrat was the basis of the film The sky-colored Angel), of which I had not previously been aware; or the writer Bruno Schulz's drawings and prints. For various reasons, these works, too, are distant from pictorial modernism.