Sunday, November 19, 2006
Art as something uncomfortable?
British writer and anti-shaving champion, Alan Moore, is one of the world's great living people. I don't want to make any big statements or anything. His new collection of graphic novels, Lost Girls, takes three of literature's great female characters, namely, Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. He also puts them in the world of 1913 and as lovers. He published them initially in 1991 but never as their entirety. I love the idea of exploring pornography as more than something that deserves a knee-jerk, politicized reaction. Moore, like one of my other favorite writers, Samuel R. Delany, takes smut and somehow shapes it into something more than just two people fucking. Or, in this case, three cartoon characters signifying Western innocence and eroticizing them. I am waiting for a soundtrack by Xiu Xiu (side project, Jamie? Please?) for some reason. I know this is a bigger issue, something that is complex and requires a myriad level of sensitivity, but I still imagine it requires at least our reading. Regardless, I urge you to read it and frame your own opinion for the sake of eradicating boredom and pleasing our sense of art as something that is supposed to be uncomfortable.
