From Steinberg, Sexuality in Art...

This much Christendom has professed at all times. Not so Christian art. For when a deceiptive style aims at the other -worldly; when the stuff of which human bodies are formed is attenuated and subtulized; when Chrsitian representations of Christ, repelled by the grossness of mater, decline o honour the corporeality God chose to assume-then, whatever else such art may be after, the down-to-earth flesh of the bodied Word is not confessed... (70)

"But to the girdle do the gods inherit" and again in Goethe's assertion that "all ethical expression pertains only t o the upper part of the body"...Thye feet themselves may be menial or humble or may simply signify the whole lower stratum, sumialy identified with the generative function. Pico della Mirandola, in the closing paragraph of the Hepataplus or Discourse on the Seven Days of Creation (1489) analyzing the body on the lines of Bernardus Silvestris, finds it :astonishing how beautifully and how perfectly": the three parts of man--head, neck to navel, and navel to feet--"correspond...to the three parts of the world. The brain, source of knowledge, is in the head; the heart, source of movement, life and heat,m is in the chest; the genital organs, the beginning of reporduction, are lcoated in the lowest part" (Heptapuls, 113)...(151)

From Batialle Divine Filth

"Madame was religious at first", said Thersea, "She was pious, but the convent sent her back. She said she loves God, but what she loves most of all are weddings..."

Madame...has no name. We call her Divinity.... (33)

No Remorse:

I can't see shit
I've got shit in my heart
God flows out
laughs
radiates
intoxicates the sky
the sky sings as loud as it can
the sky sings
thunder sings
the solar flare sings
dry eyes
the broken silence
of shit in my heart

if an orgasmic dick endgedred the universe, it's make it like it is
in the transparency of the sky, we'd have blood, screams, stench.

God is not a priest, but a prick, papa is a prick.

(48)

From Andres Seranno Works 1983-1993

Below Skin Deep, Wendy Stiner:

The tensiopn between literalism and symbolism intensified when Serrano began to photogrpah vital fluids. Blood, milk and urine are strongly coded as human symbols--in paticular , as fluids requiring containment. Prohibitions against their spillage are proverbial...When Seranno claimed...that he started using urine because it introduced yellow into his photogrpahic pallete, he recealed the laughable inadequacy of formalism to control meaning and the body...(13)

Andres Serrano: The Body Politic: Robert Hobbs.

...Seranno was relucatant to give up the hook of beauty, which is a key tool of his heart. "When one works wiht difficult subjects, he emphasized, "it is necessary to put beauty back into the accomplished work" On another occasion he noted "Maybe it's easier to dismiss work when you know you're turned off by it completely, as opposed to when your'e seduced by it" The interest in captivating viewers through the sheer beauty of his light nad colour has remianed a constant in his oierve. No matter how wrepugant his subjects may be to some people, his works are stunning. As critioc David Deitcher observed, "Serrano's photographs are t herefore indfensible to so many, not simply because they blaspheme, which in a narrow sense ,m some of them do; they are insupportable because they find beautiy in substances that have always made people recoil in horror and embarrassment." (20)

...the artist has also indicated the much moore prosaic goal of countering the everyday debasement of religious belief. He is particualry persuaive when he sas that "the nuns told us...that we worship not the crucifix but Christ....we weren't supposed to worship the symbol or give it the same level of refeveance because it is only a representration" Such reasonings establishes a basis for his statement "I dont relaly feel that I destroy icons. I feel that I creatre new ones" And it prepares one to accept his declaration that his "use of bodly fluids, especially in conneciton with Chrsitianity, has been a way of trying to personalise and redefine his realtionship to christ..." (31)

David Deitcher Cummlus from Anmerica, Parkett 21


From Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola

Sadian practice is rulled by a great otion of order: "irregularities are strenoously regualted, vice is unbridles but not without order...Expressions desicribing a purposeful structuring of the erotic scene are innummerable and standard (26)

What are here being overtuned are obiviously, in a very classical way, the social fetishes, kings, ministers, eccleastics, etc, but so too the language, the tradtional classes of writing: criminal contamination touches every style of the discourse: narrative, lyrical, moral, maxim, mythological topos. We begin to recongize that hte transgressions of language posses an offensive powqer at least as strong as that of moral transgressions, and that the poetry which is itself the language of the language og t he transgressions of language, it is therbey always constestatory... (34)

...rhetoric was also the search for a second code, an artifical language, elaborated on the basis of a given idiom...(loyala) (45)

Theresa of Avila dsicerns mediation, union, excstacy, etc and John of the Cross, who has certainly gone further then Theresa in oblitering the disconinous sets up a scrupolous code of apprehnsions (exxterior-bodily, interior-bodily, distinct and particular, confused, obscure, general, etc. ARticulkatiln appears to all as the condition, warrent and fate of language, to outstrip lagnauige, articulation must be exuahsted, extenusated, after having been recongised. We know that this is ot Ignatious;s goa; the theophany he is methodically seeking is in fact a semiophany, what he is striving to obtain is more the sign of Go d than knowledge of Him or His presence; language is his definitive horizon and articulation an orperation he can never abandon in favour of indistinct--ineffable--states. (53)

(Sade's) art consists in staturing the erotic body by simtenoiulsy occupying the principal sites of pleasure (mouth, sexual organs, anus;) each subject is thrice fufilled (in both menaings of the word) and hence each of the nine pratners finds his erotic employment (true , this empolyment is simple, whereas the subjects pleasure is threefold; class difference, libertines as against agents, rich adventuresses against porr fisherman..) (129)