Arts Sex is Boring: Boring, Boring, Boring
First: a comment on Dan’s post I’d like to highlight:
i thought the cover of the stranger was used to feature artists’ works. so… if that’s the intent, and that’s what they did, what are you all bitching to them for? why don’t you bitch at the photographer. here I’ll help you, here’s HER website: http://www.yerinmok.com
Seen in the context of her oeuvre, the cover shot makes perfect, and much less erotic, sense. (Though that phrase suddenly sounds like a euphemism for something dirty: “Dude, I totally saw her in the context of her oeuvre. It was awesome…) She’s got some great photos of nearly empty but oddly evocative rooms, houses on slag heaps, telephone lines over cityscapes, Miranda July, Woodenmustache (for that nasty purveyor of antifeminist, gynophobic bile, BUST magazine), a heartbreaking photo of a woman looking at the ocean, and other great stuff.
Second: I keep hearing/reading people who say the cover is “boring” when they’re trying to be dismissive. But I suspect the Boringistas are trying to express an emotion they don’t have a word foror deny an emotion they’ve got plenty of words for.
Here’s why: I’ve been reading a memoir by Martin Amis that includes several letters he wrote in college (c. 1965), and his younger self keeps using “boring” in completely inappropriate ways:
“It would be so boring if [my clumsiness at Latin] buggered up my Oxford Entrance paper.” (But the Oxford paper is dear to Amis’s younger-self heart.)
“It’s so boring because I’ve never felt quite so ill in all my life.” (Amis was waking up with bizarre, unexplained “fibrous nodules” on his neck which is anything but boring.)
On learning that an important academic letter had not been forwarded promptly by his uncle: “It’s bloody boring because I expressly told him to be very careful because offers must be answered within a week or else they are withdrawn.”
In these cases, I would use the adjectives like awful, disturbing, fucked up, or exasperating. But Amis’s younger-self uses boring.
Remember Sid & Nancy, the 1986 movie about the Sex Pistols with Gary Oldman (and a pre-everything bit part by Courtney Love)? Remember what the Johnny Rotten character said to a young woman who was flirting with him? “Sex is boring. Boring, boring, boring.”
I didn’t believe him. I don’t believe the younger-self Amis. And you Stranger-cover-Boringistas? I don’t believe you either.
i remain bored. i had checked out her website earlier, and liked some of the work but found myself having the same reaction, or lack of, in general. especially to the other faceless photos. i wanted to like them for their creepiness and reflexive voyeuristic qualities, but ultimately they failed to move me and i experienced them as flat- thus "bored". even though i love the idea of a photographer attempting to create meaning in photos of people, but subtracting their faces, in my opinion, the idea behind them is stronger than the work itself, particularly the cover photo which was, to me, among the least affecting.
so yes, i said i was bored but it's a slog. i hop on and off during work, so like most people, i use shorthand. just like most of the people who admired the cover used shorthand, such lengthy expositions on their love for the cover included: "beautiful" and "i like it" and approval of the gentleman's feet. hardly lengthy analysis of the photo's merits.
as to the rest of her site though, i think her portraiture is really fucking great, which surprised me because i don't often like portraiture.