by Victor Arwas
To all those fortunate enough to be endowed with imagination, fantasy can be far more real, far more exciting, far more satisfying than reality. Physical, mental, emotional barriers are transcended, and the caterpillar is transformed into the butterfly. A few rare individuals have the talent to express their fantasies: artists, writers, composers. They allow us to penetrate, if only marginally, into the wealth of this imagination, their real self.
Arnie Harrison (London) - Ancient and Modern (oil on canvas)
The amateur artist lends to be most open, displaying all his inner world as best he can. Any difficulty of communication here is rarely more than a difficulty of expression, a lack of knowledge of the vocabulary of symbolism. The trained artist is both more complex and more interesting. His knowledge of both vocabulary and syntax allows him to confuse and distract, to lay little traps for the unwary, to strew his images with red herrings, to complicate through simplification.
The rise of symbolism in art in the latter part of the 19th century was closely connected with the romantic rejection of naturalism, and was based on a search for idealism and re affirmation of positive beliefs: religion, the meaning of life, historical glories, idealised beauty. People, attitudes, animals, clothes, the position of objects, each visual aspect of a picture, had its original symbolic meaning. The advent of Freud transformed all this. Dreams and their interpretation became the language of the surrealists, frequently ambiguous because the symbols themselves changed meaning constantly, often indeed went beyond meaning to communicate a vague, indeterminate feeling rather than anything concrete. As the world of dreams opened its gates, repressed fantasy loomed.
Fantasy brightens our existence in a variety of ways. At a simple level it enables us to survive the thousands of little defeats life inflicts on us with fantasies of the crushing response we might have come up with, given the time; the satisfying little scenarios of revenge, of triumph, of one-upmanship, of sexual prowess. Walter Mitty triumphs over all. And he needs to. For those whose every longing and yearning are fulfilled in reality are few indeed. And the most frustrated longings of all ate connected with sex.
Alan Desborough (London) - Torso (sculpture of polished Camphor wood)
Books, magazines, newspapers, films, television, condition us to believe that sex is pleasurable and readily available.
The media also condition us to believe that both pleasure and availability are guaranteed if we conform to certain physical and merchandising norms (a certain hair colour, body weight, deodorant, lipstick, underwear, soap, whatever). The media condition us into a permanent state of uncertainty, unease and dissatisfaction because we are unable to come up to those norms, and so we give up before we've even started. If we do overcome the fear of not reaching those norms, we are further stymied by the realisation that all those promises were hollow: we still have to carry out inter-personal relationships ourselves.
If approaching a sexual relationship with a disability of some kind, the process is traumatically more difficult. Disability can be of any kind, of any intensity, from a stammer or a hare-lip to involuntary movement, or total lack of mobility, from a lack of teeth to a lack of limbs, from an inability to talk to an inability to reason beyond the simplest tasks. Yet all are human beings, trapped in a body with no science fiction machine to transplant them into a new bionic body.
There is no shortage of well-meaning and useful, often absolutely essential help, at many levels. Somehow, sex tends to be forgotten, the assumption made that anyone suffering from a disability (i.e. not conforming to the desirable advertised stereotype) is beyond sexual desire.
One makes the same assumptions about the elderly.
Little Moon (New York) - Nurse (pen & ink)
So fantasies evolve and are illustrated. Where specific treatments, operations, pains form part of the artist's history, they occur or recur, sometimes clearly, sometimes transformed by imagination as a motif. Each of the works in this exhibition is the product of a professional artist. Each of the images is part of the artist's own fantasy, expressed as a continuing aspect of the history of art.
There are few artists in the history of the world who have not essayed eroticism. The earliest graffiti in prehistoric caves illustrate hunting and fornication. Leonardo da Vinci painstakingly drew the organs in coitus, and within the bounds of their styles, works illustrative of the sexual need have poured from the pen, pencil and brushes of countless artists. It is unlikely that many of these works were destined for the eyes of the world. They are the artists' most personal statements, the cries from the heart, the affirmation of self, the supreme assertion that that artist is a member of the human race.
Victor Arwas owns the London art gallery Editions Graphiques and is the author of many books on art.