to be the creative, spellbinding power. The essay illustrates that it is more the style and less the subject that determines the erotic character of a work of art. Indignation, so it is concluded, is a reaction appropriate for erotic works of art. We see pictures depicting wild excesses. Only through our imagination are we partaking in the excess. The composition Pleasures for the Eyes shows that voyeurism represents a dissociated appropriation of that which is physical. Seeing is recognisable as a sort of substitute action.
The frame of a picture represents a demarcation line, which keeps the dangerous away from the real world. The essay The Loneliness of the Picture pursues the thought that the chaotic and limitless nature of eroticism has to be poured into geometric forms to become acceptable. It is thus possible to keep our desires under control.
The basis of any museum foundation is a passion for collecting things. This passion itself is a deeply erotic activity, as the essay About the Erotic Roots of the Passion for Collecting Objects attempts to prove. The collector of erotica is thus closer to the roots of the drive or urge than any other collector.
The article Sodom Berlin introduces the Berlin of the 1920s as a throbbing cultural metropolis. This is an especially prominent era in the Erotic Museum in Berlin. The essay Negation and Erection is a tribute to the great Berlin artist George Grosz, whose works became the expression of an exile’s fate.
The last essay, May 1000 Flowers Bloom!, re-examines the question of why we have such a difficult time dealing with erotic art. At the same time, this essay pleads for a responsible and mature way of dealing with erotic art, in a democratic state acting with restraint.
Dominique Larrivaz, A Brothel is Opened, 1989 and 1991. Installation. Paris and Manheim.
Jean de l’Etang, from the Trente et quelques attitudes series, c. 1950. Coloured lithograph.
The Dream about the Orgy
The light goes out, the orgy can begin.
The orgy unfolds on the darker side of culture. Humanity, true to its nature, with a heterosexually and monogamously oriented sexuality, supported by personal love, and subject to the taboos of incest, uses the orgy to violate all prohibitions, overcome all controls, and to allow full rein to all desires and wishes.
The consumption of intoxicating beverages and disinhibiting drugs are often components of an orgy. Men and women overcome the inhibitions placed on them by shame and morals, marriage and personal love. The couple expands into a threesome, foursome, eightsome; and there is even a tendency to form an impersonal group. The amalgamation of all bodies results in one body. Lines and boundaries between heterosexuality and homosexuality become blurred and are left behind, as well as divisions between one generation and another, despite incest taboos. Erotic literature has sufficient examples, which even suggest that differences between man and animal are now defunct. All psychological checks and balances are dissolved: anything goes.
Orgies prove the following: the typical sexuality of normal adults cannot clarify the erotic cravings of humanity as a whole. The immensity of cravings also frightens. That is the reason why erotic literature attaches orgies to the following attributes: a wild orgy, a licentious, ravaging, enormous, extravagant, unbelievable, obscene, outrageous orgy. The orgy is the non plus ultra of erotic imagination.
In ancient Roman times, such wild celebrations as the Saturnalia allowed people an outlet for their urges and thus limited the consequences of repression. These types of festival were connected with fertility and religions rooted in mysticism. Their experience culminated in full ecstasy. “People are besides themselves to completely merge with the divine and be enraptured,” explained Proclus, a Neoplatonist philosopher. This rapture seemed to resemble a trance or take on orgiastic forms – something Plato calls “divine madness”. The word orgy refers to such madness.
While the Christian church tried to repress and almost completely suppress sexuality, the Dionysus cult chose the path of catharsis. As a result, these periodic celebrations relaxed and satisfied people. Dionysus does not observe any limits. He overflows. He is without restraints. He represents what psychoanalysts calls the id: the reality of drives and urges that is Dionysian intoxication.
The Roman Empire, by contrast, suffocated the Dionysian gods with rules of ethical behaviour and moral constraints. “Where Rome is in command,” writes Walter Schubart in his study Religion and Eros, “there is no matriarchy, no religion based on feminine values, no deification of nature, and no experiencing the joys of creation. If Dionysian cults strayed into this world, they had to degenerate from religious celebrations to outbursts of vulgar lust. Cult-based orgiasticism turned into sexually offensive behaviour. The orgiastic celebrations reveal the basic religious idea. Nothing remained but slave labour for the desires of the flesh… This is how Dionysus took revenge on the Roman Empire.”
Promises of the Orient.
Paul Avril, illustration for De Figuris Veneris, 1906. Coloured lithograph.
Paul Avril, illustration for De Figuris Veneris, 1906. Coloured lithograph.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
Louis Philippe, The Dream of the Orgy, from a series of engraved lithographs.
The revenge of Dionysus on the Eros-hostile Christian world was manifested in the obsessive belief in witches and sorcery during the 16th and 17th centuries. It provided the “pornography of the joy of creation” (Schubart). Just like the myths of natural religions, this obsession with witches was directed towards the supernatural as well but also emphasised the darker side of the divine, the satanic. “Dionysus rose again as the devil. The devil is the sexual god of Christianity and witches are his courtesans.” The devil himself has horns, phallic shapes, and the body of a billy goat, just like the satyrs, which surrounded the Thracian god. All sexuality now carries the stamp of sin and yet it has powers that are impossible to resist. Chroniclers reported to have seen 6000 devils and witches fornicate with one another in an open field. This is somewhat reminiscent of mass unions, which were the culmination of the orgiasticism of fertility cults. “The witch spectre,” opines Schubart, “is a Dionysus cult with a negative portent.”
Goethe’s Faust experienced such a Witches’ Sabbath during the Walpurgis Night:
See and observe! You cannot see its end.
Hundreds of fires burning in a row;
They love, and drink, and dance, and chat
Tell me if you can, where to find better than that?
The mystery of fertility was defended by witches during the 16th and 17th centuries but they did this in the night realm of hell. “Alone
