ORSHI DROZDIK (1946 - )
Pornography series 1-14
1978
gelatin silver print
vintage copy
11x9 cm each
If we believe that socially constructed sexuality is the key site of women’s oppression and a means of internalizing the patriarchal order, it limits our point of view on pornography. If pornography is the depiction of sexual activity, in which a man and a woman equally takes pleasure, the only question is whose point of view will be visualized in the representation. Back in the late sixties, Susan Sontag changed the view on pornography. She examined the French radical pornographic literature and compared it with the Anglo-Saxon intellectual and academic point of view on pornography, which had rejected pornographic literature and looked down on it as vulgar. But the question remained, whether pornography was good or bad for women. In 1978, when I was considering making artwork entitled Pornography, I faced this dilemma, but it did not prevent me from examining pornographic representation. It was an important debate for me. The patriarchal representation of the naked female body was already a major issue in my artwork since 1975, and it was a potential and major challenge to create my (woman’s) point of view on pornography, which became a key focus for my art at the end of the seventies.
Orshi Drozdik, Amsterdam, 1979
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