Sexuality and Identity
I chose the black penis as my current subject because I feel it needs to be seen in its beauty and outside a pornographic or purely sexual context. It can be seen political, especially nowadays where racial tensions are on the rise and unarmed black men keep getting killed by white cops. Why? Is there a hidden inferiority complex nobody wants to talk about? The black men I talked to felt pleased that the black male sexuality found its way into the arts, as they felt that Black people have been vastly underrepresented as artists and subjects.
Continuing the States of Anxiety series, Jana Astanov interviews Eva Mueller.
The Operating Theatre: Contemporary Fiction & Las Vegas
Las Vegas has acknowledged America’s fame obsession and is vending it. The illusion of being a somebody. You get to be whatever you want and, better yet, you get to leave it there. Hide from your job and your boss and your kids, shed your skin and let out that inner slouching beast. Yeats got the city wrong, but he was right about the desert. Las Vegas is a place where the temporal and the ephemeral are morphed into insta-culture, a palace of assimilation that’s open twenty-four/seven. There is no past or future, no need for perspective or long-range thought, there is only the unending now, the new promised land, a most codified place, a domain of myth and ritual.
By Sean Hooks.