21 Have Spoken

The Giant Vagina Hanging On My Apartment Wall

Posted by John Brownlee

I would like all of you to take a good, hard look at the “painting” you see above. I used the word in quotes not to disparage it, but because it does not actually seem to be painted at all, rather being some form of canvas-like sculpture. Please tell me what you see. Because what I see is a six foot tall vagina hanging on the wall of my new Berlin apartment.

A word of explanation: one of Ectomo’s readers actually hooked me up with my new Kreuzberg pad. It is utterly gorgeous, and Mark himself is a super guy: one of those supernaturally kind and giving people who makes you feel like a boorish asshole just by standing in his presence. The apartment belongs to one of his friends (also a wonderful and generous guy) and it is fully furnished, with several pieces of art hanging on the walls.

The art is, perhaps, not my style, but that’s okay, since I’ll only be here a few months and taste in art is a highly personal thing, which no one short of its owner needs to love. And, in fact, I do take a certain joy out of some of the art’s aesthetic absurdity. The apartment is lousy with decapitated gold Buddha heads. I have infused the apartment with my own personality for the time being by putting fezzes on them. A shrine to Ganesha, the implausible Indian Elephant God, prominently adorns one corner of the flat, and it delights me just by dint of its surreal presence.

But my face immediately lit up when I walked into the apartment and, surveying it, noticed that a gigantic jelly hole was bolted to the wall. Now my days are spent staring at it and wondering if it will suddenly gush a stream of uterine fluid before the massive bloody crown of a gigantic fetus’ head rips the painting in twain. I am also considering cutting triangles out of construction paper and putting them on each side of the equatorial slit, turning the vagina into a giant vagina dentata for the duration of my stay here.

I’m not sure if I’m not reading too much of my own Freudian complexes into this. It could also, I suppose, be representative of a butt crack. Other interpretations are either a giant number 1 (a declaration of superiority on my landlord’s part, maybe?)or a capital letter I ( a masterwork of solipsism). I turn to you, o readers, to restore some semblance of objectivity to my interpretation.

Categories: Vagina, Berlin, Art
Posted at 6:45 am on August 6, 2007
21 Comments -

21 COMMENTS ARE NOT ENOUGH

The photo isn’t the best, since my camera ran out of batteries and I needed to take the picture with my laptop. The color is washed out: in real life, the slit is much pinker looking, and the surface of the painting is very flesh-like.

Comment by John Brownlee — August 6, 2007 @ 6:59 am

Maybe you’ve got a Lucio Fontana in your flat and you don’t know that… Look for non-sense sentences on the back of the frame . He used to write ‘em as a calligraphic proof of authenticity.

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Comment by Camillo Miller — August 6, 2007 @ 7:52 am

Maybe you’ve got a Lucio Fontana in your flat and you don’t know that… Look for non-sense sentences on the back of the frame . He used to write ‘em as a calligraphic proof of authenticity.

I’m ectotweeting some links ( wordpress is eating the comments with urls in them )

Comment by Camillo Miller — August 6, 2007 @ 7:55 am

JEEEEEZ ! Sorry for the redundance John .. I messed around a little !

Comment by Camillo Miller — August 6, 2007 @ 7:59 am

Camillo: no nonsense around the frame! Also, if a comment gets swallowed, it just means I need to moderate it, which I do very quickly. DON’T PANIC!

Comment by John Brownlee — August 6, 2007 @ 9:06 am

I think the fact that you can find so many ways to interpret it IS its purpose. When I was little, we used to play a game in school where you would hold your hand out towards random people and see what they did. It was sort of like performance art, in hindsight, as there were so many different ways people would react.

I managed to make enough money from people thinking I was begging that I was able to buy a Snickers. That’s awesome.

Comment by Collins — August 6, 2007 @ 9:07 am

Perhaps it is a line of bust or toe cleavage? It resonates of something dry, rather than wet.

And why not add some mustache glasses to the Buddha heads? The Marx brothers are far more droll than Shriners, after all.

Comment by Morgan Williams — August 6, 2007 @ 10:43 am

I’ve got some nice photographs of jet vapor trails a few years back, that if you look at it a certain way, bear similar Freudian glimpses.

But should we really fall into the trap of seeing a slit every time we look at a vertical line? Gives certain types of artwork more credit than it’s due.

Comment by Peregrine — August 6, 2007 @ 11:23 am