Hdbk, 300 illus, £35, Vision On Publishing. £26.25 (& £5 shipping) online at: www.vobooks.com
That
Rankin he never stops does he? Naked men, naked women, film stars to die for,
hip hop immortals, dead rock icons... He just keeps those coffee-table photography-as-masturbation
books cumming. And this one (published last autumn) gets right to the quintessential
question on any true artist's mind: "Can porn ever be art?" In other words, when
does the erotic image move from being a pornographic statement to an artistic
one? In PORN? 55 image-makers have a go at testing the notion.
Mark
Irving writes in his big pink introduction to the book: "Full-on straight porn
is rarely art, such is the bending-over-backwards by the cultural mafioso on gay
issues and its peculiar sense of shame about visual representations of full-on
heterosexual acts. Sex on its own isn't very clever and isn't meant to be, and
so depictions of sex must be mediated somehow in order for them to be art." Intellectualism
aside, the world of pornoland 'as art' depicted in PORN? will either challenge
your conceptions of what the erotic should be or simply turn you on. Beyond naked
flesh and genitalia there's a whole lot more. Try it for size. RdF
