lips02         hand02

 

 

Juxtaposed to the „ideal“ woman is the second image: a male left hand that rests with outstretched fingers palm down on a table. With a knife in his right hand the man tries to hit the spaces between his fingers. If he fails he will clearly injure himself. You can hear the sound of the hard strikes the blade makes on the table. If it is not heard the viewer knows before his cry of pain he stabbed his hand again. What used to be a cliché of a male ritual, the proof of the power of mind over the body, changes into hysterical self-affirmation. The ideal, as the church and religion have proclaimed it for hundreds of years has long been replaced by sciences, progress and a series of role models of a media and information driven society. Pain as proof of material existence is literally marking our physical limits to prevent man from becoming invisible in a collectively imaginary world. The old fashioned fantasy of the „Madonna“ promising love to the repentant sinner is subverted, into one being able to control one’s physical responses and the subsequent impotence of the woman’s restrictive linguistic model. What looks like religious contempt and punishment of the weak flesh turns into physical autonomy and the right to commit suicide.

<      >