Harms way: lust & madness murder & mayhem: a book of photographs. Vile Bodies: photography and the crisis of looking. Damaged Bodies - The Religious art of Joel-Peter Witkin. The High Renaissance and Mannerism: Italy, the North and Spain, 1500-1600.
Joel-Peter Witkin: An Objective Eye Trailer #1. Whereas Arbus chooses to accentuate all the weird qualities in a natural environment, Witkin engages with his subjects in a studio setting. Photographers such as Diane Arbus has studied the outcasts of society, purposely choosing the eccentric to be photographed.
Does the subject matter diminish the beauty of his work? We as an audience choose to stay and examine the photo (Marino, T, 2012)Witkins choice to use the weird, the uncanny and the outcasts of society has been explored by his predecessors and contemporaries. Indeed, the initial shock of the subject matter that he deals with is always under constant debate. What is normally associated with Witkin’s work is the macabre, the uncanny and the bizarre. At the very end of the show, the box opened to reveal a nude Michelle Olley, a replica of Joel Peter Witkins Sanatarium. The cube was a runway with a box being in the middle. The show opened with a mirrored cube where the audience were viewing themselves for the whole hour before it started. This particular photograph went on to inspire Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2001 collection, appropriately entitled Asylum. Unlike many of his portraits where he references old masters, Sanitarium does not evoke the violence and pain to the model but is instead from the monkey.įigure 4 Alexander McQueen Spring/Summer 2001 The reference to Venus is therefore significant. both because of its impossibility and the myth of its unattainability.’ A constant stream of mass media “beauty”, Witkin reverts back to historical beauty instead of the mass consumed image of beauty. 47) criticised that the beautiful body is ‘a figure that is attractive. If Venus is a reminder that her figure is a “beautiful” body, in re imagining Venus in an insane asylum, the ethos which society holds beauty is abandoned. Should a viewer be enticed by her erotic nature despite the location? Yet at the same time, the location of an asylum questions her status as a femme fatale. This is also supported by the fact that she is nude, confident of her sexuality. Despite being the observed, she is not emasculated by the viewer - the lingering hand suggests power, a surveyor and not the surveyed. 75) Witkin’s character is assertive and dominant. her peaceful sleep divorces her entirely from the spectators world, and there is non of that self-conciousness later found in Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Titian’s Sleeping Venus with Cupid is ‘unusual.
The model’s eyes are closed, yet is not perceived as a passive character - she exudes the energy of a femme fatale. Her nonchalant pose is one which is similar to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), Bordone’s Sleeping Venus with Cupid (1540). These images which Witkin painstakingly constructs before photographing show a strong grasp of art history and is informed by those have been before him.
#Joel peter witkin sanitarium full
The full bodied woman and her pose is reminiscent of High Renaissance paintings of Venus. Photographed in New Mexico during 1983, Joel-Peter Witkin’s Sanitarium is a photo depicting a woman with tubes attached to her via the mouth and genitalia of a monkey.
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