FETISH
Heimo Zobernig
with an essay by Sabeth Buchmann
Three Star Books
Published Summer 2007

Press Release

ound and cleft. Quite simple, really, and yet the archetypal subject of pictorial fantasy and literary imagination, not to speak of the daily musings of lesser beings, of men and also women. The origin of the world.
When Gustave Courbet painted the genitals of a woman in 1866, limiting his pictorial subject to splayed legs and a central focus on lips and pubic hair, even his friends were scandalized, not to speak of a public that finally had occasion to see his work only at the very end of the twentieth century. Forever, it hung behind curtains or painted panels, the private pleasure of its varying owners.
Marcel Duchamp picked the subject up again, or laid it down, so to speak, in Etant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau / 2° le gaz d’éclairage an installation he worked on for the last twenty years of his life, subsequently acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here too, such an uproar was caused that, even in the swinging 1960s, a vision of post-coital abandon could cause shivers.
The power of eroticism in art still dictates that ancient Roman artifacts of sexual nature are housed in a secret room in the archaeological museum of Naples, banished since their discovery in the nineteenth century.
Thousands of artists throughout history, including Caravaggio and Egon Schiele, have been slapped with fines and even prison for their licentious depictions.

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