Posted on
2021-07-12
“Eroticism opens the way to death. Death opens the way to the denial of our individual lives. Without doing violence to our inner selves, are we able to bear a negation that carries us to the farthest bounds of possibility?”
Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (1957)
It’s well past midnight at a salty New England inn when Ishmael, the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), is awoken by a strange bedfellow. Queequeg, a Polynesian harpooner, is looking for a place to sleep. He’s introduced as an object of horror: candlelight reveals his “tropical tanning” to be a “purplish yellow” coat of Maori tattoos. “This wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me,” Ishmael recalls. “I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.” Melville never tells us what was felt – or indeed, eaten – but, by morning, Ishmael confesses, “You had almost thought I had been his wife.” The two men learn to love each other, in a story that has often been read as a coded tale of gay miscegenation.
Opposite – Bedwork, 2021
Exhibition runs through to August 21st, 2021
Praz-Delavallade
6150 Wilshire Blvd
CA 90048
Los Angeles
www.praz-delavallade.com
