Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

46 stella viljoen
Figure 2: E Manet, Olympia, 1862-1863, Oil on Canvas, 1.3 x 1.9m
Musée d’Orsay, Paris (Honour & Fleming 1999:714)
which GQ apparently positions itself within the ‘artistic’ framework
of gentlemen's pornography by summoning up aesthetic experiences
that are ostensibly similar to the experience of entering an art
gallery.
3. Genteel Aesthetics
The oppositional spaces from which conventional pornography and
gentleman's pornography originated perhaps explain their initial
aesthetic divergence. While pornography, as the term is currently
understood, has its origin in the invention of the camera — a process
marked by industry, innovation and egalitarian ideals (in the
Rousseauean sense) — gentlemen's pornography is intimately connected
to the nineteenth century's creation of a new recondite social
space, which Walter Kendrick calls ‘The Secret Museum’. 11 The
former led to mass-production and mass-consumption of the obscene,
and the latter to its concealment in a cloak of acceptability. Where
conventional pornography ‘pours out ... into the city streets’, in the
words of Linda Nead, 12 gentlemen's pornography confines the obscene
11 Kendrick (n 3 above).
12
L Nead ‘Female nude: art, obscenity and sexuality’ in N Mirzoeff (ed) The visual
culture reader (1992) 487.