

there's something of the icon in these images--the sign or likeness that signifies, that represents something of greater importance. images like these have a unique power to inspire. they may seem a mere collection of cocks and holes. but if you look closely, i think you'll notice that each image, though basically depicting the same thing, is also "saying" something totally unique. the picture speaks, if you will.

icons developed in eastern christianity as flat panel paintings that showed holy objects or beings in a stylized manner that removed the subjectivity of the depicted. the emphasis was on the "holy"--on what was considered transcendent, "bigger" than the individual. bigger than the subject depicted or the individual viewer of the icon. thus they sucked the viewer into a reality that is larger than himself, a bigger reality that is always escaping and yet informing the image. in the same way, i suspect, these close-up images of cocks and holes become so much more--not less--when the eyes, the face, the bodies, and the subjectivity of the individual participants is trimmed away. each image implies or suggests a whole set of relations and associations for me, from the warmest and wettest welcome to struggle to take it all in, reverence to enjoyment to satiety. (do you see the welcome and desire of the yawning technique in the third photo?) yet each one entirely unique.