{"id":37312,"title":"~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus ©~Ñ~vibrator stripped bare, even: Les Bacchanales de Venus©~ñ~Endless, Of Euphoric Love Programs and a Hundred Other Things ","dimensions":"21,5 x 14 cm, 201 p., language: English, publisher: Orbis Tertius Press, Alberta, ISBN: 9781778156687","date_begin":"2024-01-01","material":"","art_status_id":13,"legal_status_id":47,"category_id":141,"platform_id":1,"deleted":false,"asset_count":1,"stream_count":0,"collection":"Collectie M HKA, Antwerpen","cached_tag_list":"","publishing_process_id":1,"annotation":"","date_end":null,"reference":"","stream_count_app":14,"permalink":"venus-n-vibrator-stripped-bare-even-les-bacchanales-de-venus-n-endless-of-euphoric-love-programs-and-a-hundred-other-things","description_ca":"","short_description_ca":"","description_it":"","short_description_it":"","cached_primary_asset_url":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/mhka_ensembles_production/assets/public/000/095/628/medium_500/Venus2_Nechvatal.jpeg?1773400368","cached_actor_names":"Joseph Nechvatal","hide_from_json":false,"prev_platform_id":null,"description_uk":"","short_description_uk":"","description_tr":"","short_description_tr":"","mhka_works":false,"category":{"en":"Artist Novel","nl":"Artist Novel","fr":"Artist Novel"},"poster_image":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/mhka_ensembles_production/assets/public/000/095/628/large/Venus2_Nechvatal.jpeg?1773400368","poster_credits":null,"translations":[{"locale":"en","short_description":"","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLiterary synopsis\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ venus© ~ Ñ ~ vibrator stripped bare, even' is the 2024 stripped-down edition of '~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ venus© ~ Ñ ~ vibrator, even' that was published in late-2023 by Orbis Tertius Press as an A4-scaled art book in voluptuous colour. Conceived and written in 1995 in Paris - and only a year into the history of the World Wide Web – by a writer-artist deeply involved with early mapping of the potential of this new interactive digital realm, its publication by Orbis Tertius Press gives us the chance to revisit this watershed moment through a project which confronts the constructs, prohibitions and moral machinations of society’s take on the erotic and desiring body, in the process evolving a hybrid text convulsive with the revolutionary spirit of avant-garde creativity. Concerning the narrator’s cyber-adventures in the realm of the Venus©~ñ~Endless~LOve Systems Program and its host Venus©~ and her many manifestations of erotic desire, the novel does not so much grow beyond its bawdy Ballardian mock-pastoral origins, as work its psychic-material excitations into an auto-erotic live-mapping of a new and constantly shifting body-philosophy. Repurposing textual registers that evoke De Sade, J.K. Huysmans, Bataille, Ballard and a raft of theorists including Baudrillard, Deleuze \u0026amp; Guattari, and of course the implicitly evoked psychoanalytic schema of Freud and Lacan, the book postulates a new order of being on the event horizon of our sexual voyage; a “hyper-horizontal-happy life” as proposed by its hostess; and one finessed here via the text’s evidently prolonged immersion in a mode of decadence learned from such source inspirations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRelation of the novel to the artist’s practice\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOriginally written in 1995 during Joseph Nechvatal's artist-in-residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Nechvatal’s narrator refers occasionally to Marcel Duchamp’s conceptualisation of the ‘bachelor machine,’ as embodied in his work La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même.\u0026nbsp;Duchamp has been a continuous influence on Nechvatal’s computer-robotic assisted paintings as far back as 1986. Within the book and these paintings, we can see a contraption replete with\u0026nbsp; ‘sex cylinders’, ‘desire gears’, a ‘reservoir of love gasoline’, and a ‘general area of desire magneto’ designed to set the bachelor in a ‘pumping trance-state’ ~ a state which, according to Nechvatal’s reading, represents Duchamp’s ‘definitive desire when he is in an uninhibited bachelor machine mode’ to attain ‘a mystical state of being….’; a state in which previously known boundaries and borders melt away, leaving the auto-erotic subject-object in a perpetual state of excited coming-into-being. Nechvatal is fascinated by the potential of this auto-erotic machinic process as a lost ritual of digital-alchemical becoming. Of course, this image of automation as a generative intervention into the rigid category systems of social hegemony struck a chord in the sphere of early C20 avant-garde creativity responding to the modernist spirit, in turn provoking some of the most virulent criticism of Surrealism’s representation of gender possibilities, in particular its construction of the binaries of active/passive which casts the woman as muse or ‘automatic woman’; as ‘conductor of mental electricity’ (Breton’s words) not as independent generator of creative thought.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"},{"locale":"nl","short_description":"","description":""},{"locale":"fr","short_description":"","description":""},{"locale":"ru","short_description":"","description":""},{"locale":"de","short_description":"","description":""},{"locale":"es","short_description":"","description":""},{"locale":"el","short_description":"","description":""}],"actors":[{"id":5874,"name":"Joseph Nechvatal","category":{"en":"Creator","nl":"Vervaardiger","fr":"Créateur"}}]}