"sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal"

“Sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal, though pop-culture magazines like Cosmopolitan suggest that it is. It is intense, often desperate. The internal landscape is violent upheaval, a wild and ultimately cruel disregard of human individuality, a brazen, high-strung wanting that is absolute and imperishable, not attached to personality, no respecter of boundaries. It ends not in sexual climax but in a human tragedy of failed relationships, vengeful bitterness in an aftermath of sexual heat, personality corroded by too much endurance of undesired, habitual intercourse, conflict, a wearing away of vitality in the numbness finally of habit or compulsion or the loneliness of separation. The experience of fucking changes people, so that they are often lost to each other and slowly they are lost to human hope.

The pain of having been exposed, so naked, leads to hiding, self-protection, building barricades, emotional and physical alienation or violent retaliation against anyone who gets too close…”

- Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse

iris nesher "sexual intercourse is not intrinsically banal", c print

This isn't really what the show will be about, but this was a certain passage and print combination that I found particularly entrancing. It isn't really my place to post any of the other writings, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to give a little taste of what the next show at the gallery I work for, Bruno David Gallery, will be like. Opening will be on September 10.

http://brunodavidgallery.com/artistDetail.cfm?id_artist=119&n=Iris+Nesher

stars and mountains

on body

here's a story about me: i learned to walk on my first birthday.

my cousin said that it was as though i woke up and decided, yep this is the day guys. i got up and fell relentlessly, determined face plant after face plant, until my parents probably thought i was retarded. finally, i got up walking and truthfully, i've been walking and falling ever since.

in between middle school and high school, i gave myself the nickname of 'fel'. as in, i fell, but that's in the past. i fell, but i always get back up. i fell, but never again.

that was not true. perhaps it should have been, 'fell, fall, will fall'. but this is how i stumble through. there has been conversation lately about my insecurities, my lack of confidence in myself, but i disagree; i feel that i intimately know my weaknesses, and am aware of my strengths. afterall, we're the masters of our own destruction, and when that day comes, i would like to be able to assess how i reached that point.

maybe my circulation is bad, but whenever i get hurt, the scar does not fade easily. being a sculpture major is not necessarily good for my clumsiness either. i've cut myself on band saws, burned my fingers several times, cut myself on table edges and assortment of blades. i have little marks all over my arms, legs, and face even, like constellations,

like drawings.

i throw myself through sand and waves. my body burnished with mistakes, polished. it may not be pretty, but i wouldn't know how else to be. so, friends, stop challenging my scars. don't look down on me when i fall. i treasure my hard-earned patina. and you'd be foolish to feel sorry for me. watch me, and you'll see.