Art and Literature - Pleasure Bound

Deborah Lutz, professor of Victorian culture and literature at Long Island University and author of The Dangerous Lover, reads and discusses her new book Pleasure Bound. The conversation with the renowned artist David Salle and moderated by Arezoo Moseni, will explore the lives and works of Victorian pornographers, sex rebels who exposed the dark side of Victorian London. The work of these artists uncovers troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric: the struggle for women’s emancipation, the dissolution of traditional religions into more personal expressions of faith, and the pressing need to expand accepted forms of sexual expression. These were artists and writers who gathered together to create sexually themed art, thus highlighting the eroticism of collaboration. Keeping in mind the notion of collaboration that has come back into the art world recently, Lutz and Salle will consider the aesthetics of collectivity. 

In the 1860s, at the height of the Victorian era, the world was changing at an unsettling pace. Darwin outraged the devout, and a Woman’s Suffrage Bill challenged the social and political order. It was during these uncertain times that two new groups burst onto the scene to take full advantage of the sea change swirling about them: the Cannibal Club and the Aesthetes. Scandals developed around the work of these groups because they exposed troubles that ran beneath the surface of the larger social fabric. Out of these two clans sprang most of the sexually themed writing and painting (including out-and-out pornography) of the latter half of the nineteenth-century. In Pleasure Bound, Deborah Lutz combines history and biography, taking us beyond the eyebrow raising practices of these sex rebels and uncovering a taboo-loving counterculture whose reverberations can be felt today.

Copies of Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism are available for purchase and signing at the event.

David Salle, Tennyson, 1983, oil and acrylic on canvas and linen with wood plaster relief, 78 x 117 inchesDavid Salle, Childhood, 1998, oil and acrylic on canvas and linen, 96 x 118 inchesDavid Salle, Picnic, 2001, oil and acrylic on canvas and linen, 74 x 126 inches.

Deborah Lutz lives and writes in Brooklyn. Her scholarship focuses on the history of sexuality, pornography and erotica; gender and gay studies; material culture; and the history of attitudes toward death and mourning. Her work has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and The Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women. Her first book—The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative traces a literary history of the erotic outcast. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and collections, including Victorian Literature and Culture, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, and Cabinet. Lutz is currently at work on two books. One explores the materialism of Victorian death culture and “secular relics”: little things treasured because they belonged to the dead. The other project weaves together the life stories of three famous Victorian women—the feminist Josephine Butler, the courtesan Catherine Walters, and the convicted murderer Florence Maybrick—and their struggles for sexual power on a national stage.

David Salle helped define the post-modern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, Documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International, and most recently the Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Solo exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; and the Guggenheim Bilbao. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums in America, Europe, and Asia.

As a painter whose work comes out of a tradition of installation and performance, Salle is a long-time collaborator with choreographer Karole Armitage, designing sets and costumes for many of her ballets and operas. Their collaborations have been staged at Metropolitan Opera, the Joyce Theater, Paris Opera, Opéra Comique, Opera Deutsche, Berlin; and La Fenice among others. Salle received a Guggenheim fellowship for theater design in 1986 and in 1995 directed the feature film Search & Destroy starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken.

Salle has also contributed essays, reviews and commentary to Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Bomb, Modern Painters, and the Paris Review as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.