Erotic Worlds of Fantasies and Dreams

Saudek: Life, Love, Death & Other Such Trifles, text and photography by Jan Saudek, 1991, Art Unlimited [P.O. Box 1760, 1000 BT, Amsterdam, Holland], hardbound, oversized, 160 pages, $75.

Eros : Desire : Sex : Dreams : Flesh : Sky : Death : Birth : Innocence : Revelation : Mystery : Discovery : Power : Temptation : Surrender : Yearning : Youth : Aging : Beauty : Grotesqueness : Nakedness : Transformation. These are a few of the subjects of Jan Saudek’s grand book of surrealistically erotic photography, Saudek: Life, Love, Death, and Other Such Trifles.

Saudek is a unique collection of erotically charged photography, a book that takes the elements of eros and sexuality well beyond the literal, a book that breaks the conventions of both pornographic and desexualized art to offer one photographers perspective on the erotic mysteries in all their confusion and complexity.

Most basically, this is a book about the body, about the erotic body, about the erotic body as an expression and manifestation of fleshy desire in all its forms. Most wonderfully, it is about how the erotic is not rational, not simple, not tidy. It about how life — real life, passionate crazy unwieldy life — twists and turns, laughs and cries, turns us inside out over and over again, in ways that are wonderful and horrible, exciting and painful, sexy and bizarre all at once. These are the days of miracle and wonder, and don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.

It is perhaps our saddest fate that we live in a culture that has, with the cold precision of a Nazi surgeon, meticulously extracted the worlds of sex and eros from the emotional and psychological underpinnings that give those worlds their birth, their life and color. This latest phase of a much older tyranny — this urge to enclose the erotic/sexual drive, the origin of mystery, within the walls of reason and science — began in the early part of this century when Germanic sex manuals made their appearance, defining in the most carefully clinical of terms just what sex was and how it should best be performed. At the time, this was seen as a progressive, sex-positive breakthrough, and in many ways it was just that. For the first time, sex was talked about openly and publicly, and new respect was given to sexual fulfillment as an essential part of existence, replacing the sex-denying dictate of the Victorian West that sex was a subject utterly beneath refined acknowledgment.

For the first time, thanks to the enlightenment of Weimar Germany, sex was to be acknowledged as a significant part of life, an essential ingredient to a fulfilling marriage. With the manic overconfidence typical of a culture that believes science can provide the answers to all questions of importance, the new sex manuals of the 1920’s and 1930’s purported to explain precisely, analytically, in the most impeccable medical and scientific terms, how sex could best be accomplished — how the good man and the good woman were to do sex properly and effectively, how they were to perform for each other the act of sexual gratification, how they were to obtain for themselves the sexual satisfaction that was being rehabilitated from the trivial to the essential. Anything worth doing is worth doing correctly, after all. And so the good doctors proceeded to offer their supposedly objective, knowledgeable, manageable insights into the matter, laying sexual existence, one of the greatest mysteries of being alive, on the operating table so they could begin dissecting away.

This was the time when Freud and the psychoanalytic revolution he inspired were just beginning to come into their own. The power and intricacy of the subconscious, with its (so it was said) obsessive and potentially dangerous preoccupation with matters sexual, was beginning to be acknowledged in progressive medical and scientific circles, while it was conservatively ridiculed in others. Freud had the nerve to suggest, after all, that all beings — most particularly children, and even infants — were fundamentally and primally oriented around their sexuality. Wilhelm Reich went even further to suggest that this basic sexual orientation was not even a problem — that the problems came from not from the sexual energy itself but from the unnatural ways antisexual society tried to suppress and control the inherent and vibrant “vegetative” orgasmic potential of the individual.

Struggling to acquire the barest shreds of respectability, the new psychology attempted to validate itself by adopting the rational and scientific assumptions and habits of thought presaged any such recognition. The mysterious workings of human behavior, most emphatically including sex, were offered to the intellectual world as science, as medicine, as That Which Can Be Entirely Known and Understood, as That Which Can Be Made Reasonable, Rational, Civilized, and Dignified.

But if there is any one thing that can be said about sex, about the erotic drive, about the primal sexual urge, it is that sex is anything but reasonable, rational, civilized, and dignified; anything but scientific and medicinal. And there’s the rub: When we try to fit the fluid, amebic world of sexual desire into the rectangular confines of rational thought, we invariably lose both the heart and the soul of the sexual phenomenon. We lose the heat and the power, the mystery and the complexity, and thus, truly, our connection to one of the deepest and most profound aspects of human fulfillment. Even if we scientifically manage to find our way to a truncated, sanitized, stunted version of permitted sexual expression, we find ourselves wondering at the same time why such expression leaves us feeling unfulfilled, why the core hunger inside us — the emptiness we have been told we can fill with sex, reasonably pursued — remains unsatisfied.

Painfully aware of our restless longing, we wonder what we are doing wrong. We publish new sex manuals, refine our techniques, to no avail. Perhaps we retreat from the erotic quest altogether, call the sexual revolution history, pledge renewed allegiance to our antisexual heritage. Perhaps, we may say, the strait-laced good fathers were right when they insisted that seeking happiness through sexual fulfillment was nothing more than hedonistic illusion, a path that leads nowhere, certainly nowhere good, nowhere important, certainly not to anything that could be called deep psychic fulfillment and satisfaction, to soulmaking.

Having reduced sexual imagination to the unfulfilling, we write books with titles like The End of Sex and invent concepts like sex addiction to explain our unrelenting sexual emptiness. Meanwhile, under the scrutiny of reasonableness, our erotic dreams and sexual yearnings wither and die. We comfort ourselves by advancing our careers, gathering new and more elaborate material toys, pursuing disembodied forms of spirituality, forcing our concept of desexualized order on ourselves and, as much as we can, on the people and nations around us.

We celebrate this as meaningful existence, and react with surprising anger to anyone who threatens to pierce the bubble we have so carefully constructed, to reveal that the emperor has no erotopsychic clothes.

This separation of the erotic from the actual dynamics of the unconscious, of the sexual from the archetypal, of desire from mystery, is precisely what the photography of Jan Saudek successfully begins to address. Saudek, the 57-year-old Czech photographer whose work is now finally achieving recognition in the West if not in his own country, explores the full force of the erotic mysteries, especially their troubling complexity and magnificent contradictions. One after another, his images offer passages through which we can reconnect the murky, irrational, often forbidden images of our erotic yearnings to the psychic soil from which they spring.

Entering the world of Saudek’s imagery calls us to leave behind the erotic and sexual literalism that surrounds us everywhere, from the halls of high art to the littered streets of pornography. Saudek’s photos do not try to document sexual or erotic practice itself, but to give us images from the erotic underbelly, from shadowy unconscious realms. His images take us by the hand, take us by the heart and the belly, by the unreasonable genitals, and lead us down into the pungent, mysterious, ultimately unintelligible world they call home.

A father lies on a bare floor, holding his naked baby up to a window which opens to the limitless sky. A naked young girl lies beneath the same window, raising her arms and inviting the sky into the room. A voluptuous woman calls a feral lover down through the window to ravish her anticipating body. A young woman arches her pelvis high to the window, reaching for whatever may lie outside the limited confines of her room.

This is not about correctly performing this or that sexual technique on one or another perfect body form. This is about something far more basic, about the essence of yearning and reaching. The core of erotic feeling is present, Saudek says without apology, in the non-sexual love between parent and child, in the pre-pubescent innocence of children in their unselfconscious bodies, even as it is present in the act of sex between adult lovers.

A nude young girl is transformed in a series of six photographs from simple unadorned child to childlike femme fatale, taking on more sexual representation the more she is clothed, the more she is wrapped with sex-related artifice by those around her. The transformation makes us nervous — childhood innocence converted stepwise into young object of adult desire. A 19th-century matron emerges in a series of four photographs from beneath her cloak and her clothing, until she stands before us entirely naked, her body shaved from head to toe. We are caught in yet another unnerving transition, between the familiar and the intimate, between propriety and nudity, between our hibtual hiding and the nakedness of revelation.

In another series of photographs, presented in pairs, Saudek also contrasts our naked with our hidden selves. He depicts a series of mundane street scenes — two washerwomen standing together, a woman selling fruit from a stall while a couple reads a poster on the wall, a woman dropping coins in the hat of a blind street beggar, a man sitting in a corner. First we see the scenes as we ususally do, with the people clothed. Then the scene is reintroduced with the same people completely naked. It is a simple trick, but through it we are forced to visually acknowledge that, under the clothing of every person we pass on the street, there is a live naked body, a naked human being, vulnerable and guileless. Intellectually, this is obvious. But looking at everyone on the street as a naked body that only happens to be wrapped in clothing has the effect of shaking us forcefully. The erotic is always present, Saudek seems to be saying, just one layer beneath the surface.

In other photographs Saudek speaks eloquently of the transformations wrought upon the body by time. A beautiful young girl grows older in a series of three matched photos taken over some twenty years, her body changing shape and texture, her face gathering age. Another young girl stands nude with her seated, dressed mother at age ten, and then again at age twenty. We see how time performs its change on the young girl and the older woman, on the naked self and the clothed self.

In yet another series of photos, Saudek addresses the interrealtionship of eros, gender, and nakedness, counterpoising paired photos in which the men and women reverse their roles. A naked woman leans far back, her hands locked together over her crotch which faces the camera. Turned upside down, the photo shows a man in precisely the same pose. The two aspects of the image affect us entirely differently, leaving us to wonder why this is so. In another photo pair we see, on the left, a clothed man, seated, holding the hand and looking into the face of a naked, innocent young woman. On the right it is the man who is naked and vulnerable, the woman who is clothed and in control. One photo feels so familiar, the other so unusual. Are we surprised?

A photo shows a man and woman in the pose of a conventional portrait. The man, dressed and seated, carries the air of patrician superiority and control. The woman, naked and standing, seems ludicrous as she adopts a similar stance of cool distance. In the accompanying photo it is the woman who is dressed, her coolness now entirely appropriate, while the naked man appears ridiculous in his assumed attitude of invulnerable superiority.

How many of our presumptions and affected airs are exposed by the simple act of revealing the body, bringing the erotic fact of the body out of hiding, out from under its artificial wraps? How much presumptuousness and pomposity evaporates in the face of the simple fact of erotic vulnerability?

Coming out from hiding is much of what Saudek is about. He calls on us to reveal ourselves for who we are — not sanitized, beautified models of perfection, but roily, complicated, convoluted human beings. His images are compelling, appealing, disturbing, challenging. They put us face to face with the unexpected, over and over again: the unexpected in ourselves. We don’t respond to these photos as we think we might, as we think we should. We don’t respond to them in one simple way at all. We are attracted and repelled at the same time, intrigued and disgusted, bored and fascinated.

Running through everything, Saudek implicitly states — through all our being as men and women, as children and adults, as light forces and dark — through all this runs the erotic river, the erotic world of fantasies and dreams, of limitless flesh and emotion, the beautiful and the grotesque, tenderness and violence, innocence and experience, the known and unknown, the knowable and the unknowable. Spending time with his images offers an opportunity for us to begin to find our way back to some of the erotic mystery and complexity we have lost and so urgently need to rediscover.