Kerstin Stakemeier: Obscene Aesthetics
A lecture organised by the studio for Art and Time | Film.
Obscene Aesthetics
Within a colonial horizon, sexuality makes sense only where it relates to its stately, reproductive, cause. it might relate to it negatively, but it remains legible only as long as it can be understood within the horizon of humanity’s ongoing existence, within a linear, national order of (the) sense(s). sex makes the state, and racialization makes sex. modern history, or rather modern historiography, as a close knit entanglement of what sigmund freud identified as human phylogeny (development of a species) and ontogeny (development of an organism), is premised on the perpetual reproduction of modern man, on a history of his sense/s. that frantz fanon insisted against this biological deadlock on a third, developmental classifier, that of sociogeny, as that which determines how ontogeny and phylogeny (dis)connect, (de)humanize, defines which sex is granted (a)social legibility.
i want to discuss two positions that significantly deviate from freud’s sense/s (without speaking much abt freud): firstly the „sexualästhetik“ of peter gorsen, a vienna-based art theoretician and self-declared „mentalitätshistoriker“ who passed away in 2017 and between the mid 1960s and the late 1980s argued for aesthetics to be necessarily obscene. i will give an introduction into why he thinks so and ask what that might mean today, how what figures as obscene has changed since. secondly i want to show an example of what an aesthetic work with unstately sex might mean today, theo montoya’s 2022 documentary film „anhell69“, to discuss how it makes time itself obscene.