The Sweet Fragrance of Illicit Desire: Images of Fantasy in Modern Pornography and Dutch Still Life
BY STAFF WRITER CAMERON LEE ’22
In Jan Davidsz de Heem’s still life Breakfast with Champagne Glass and Pipe, fruit, drink, and material goods invite the viewer to partake in a gluttonous feast. A partially-peeled lemon attracts attention to the center of the painting, its peel twirling elegantly like a strand of yellow ribbon and its juicy flesh glittering like a multi-faceted diamond. To the right, two halves of a pomegranate erotically lounge atop a shiny silver plate, their vibrant seeds pulsing with human vitality and glistening like rubies in the dim light. In the background of the image, grapes twinkle like translucent dewdrops and a great silver vat pictured off-center solidifies the grand display of excessive bounty and affluence. Much like visual pornogrophy, the painting conveys a theme of desire, offering the audience a tantalizing taste of opulence while also leaving them craving for more. Yet in spite of all its dramatic realism, the painting is only an image and cannot offer the audience anything of tangible substance other than the canvas of art itself.
Plate 1: Jan Davidsz de Heem,
Still-Life, Breakfast with Champagne Glass and Pipe
, 1642.
Much like De Heem’s piece and the broader genre of 17th century Dutch still life, video pornography appeals to the audience’s desires, offering images of fantasy which do not and cannot exist in the real world. Porn films provide the audience with a means of feeding their sexual fantasies without fully satiating their desire. Both pornography and 17th century Dutch still life images arrange idealized forms of their respective objects of desire to create appealing compositions of pleasure. Fantasies become nearly tangible, depicting pleasure at the highest level of saturation almost to the point of gluttony. Such forms of media deploy the image as a vehicle for pleasurable consumption to maximize enjoyment for the viewer.
While pornography refers to a vast range of media, in the context of this essay I define pornography as video porn available on streaming websites such as Pornhub. Internet porn is the most commonly consumed form of pornographic content; Pornhub’s “2018 Year in Review” indicates that every minute, 63,992 new visitors arrive at Pornhub, 207,405 videos are watched and 57,750 searches are performed, making it the 46th most popular site on the web. Additionally, as a form of visual media Internet pornography employs methods of visual manipulation similar to that of Dutch still life to elicit a physical response from the viewer.
Unlike many previous forms of art, which often served religious or political functions for the church, state and the wealthy upper class, the new genre of Dutch still life emerged alongside the rise of consumer culture in the Netherlands during the 17th century. Trade dominated the lives of the Dutch, and as they became wealthier they could afford to splurge on luxury items, exhibiting an increased appetite for art. Art became a public commodity, no longer exclusively reserved for the church, royalty, and the exceptionally wealthy. As such, Dutch still life emerged as an extravagant display of middle class wealth and affluence, pictorializing a consumerist fantasy acutely tailored to match the shifting desires of the Dutch people.
As the genre developed, the paintings became increasingly luxurious and exotic to celebrate the flourishing economy and the rapid success of the Dutch East and West India Companies. Imported goods replaced locally-produced products in paintings. Comparing two Dutch still life pieces by Hans van Essen (1615, Plate 2) and Jan Davidsz de Heem (1642, Plate 1), the change over time becomes strikingly evident. In the later painting, a wide, triangular flute of champagne takes the place of local craft beer; succulent grapes and lemons from Italy replace rotund hunks of homemade cheese; a shiny green sheet of silk elegantly drapes over the table in place of a simple white cloth. The paintings often included commodities imported from outside of Europe including Chinese porcelain, Persian carpets, and even slaves from Africa. Dutch still life began a tradition of depicting foreign objects in Western media, and established a practice of visually consuming “exoticism,” often at the expense of non-Western cultures, to obtain feelings of satisfaction, affluence, power, and pleasure.
Plate 2: Attributed to Hans van Essen,
Still Life with Cheese, Fish, and Onions.
Oil on panel. 1615.
Today, video pornography continues this trend of graphic exoticization, with human bodies acting as the sole objects of desire rather than material goods and commodities. Pornhub’s “2018 Year In Review” reports that several of the most searched for terms in 2018 include: “hentai,” “japanese,” “asian,” “korean,” “ebony,” and “chinese,” with “hentai” the second most searched for term and “japanese” the fifth most searched for term. Porn often fetishizes Asian, Black, and otherwise non-White people of color by pairing White, usually male actors with non-White, usually female actors. Such interracial pairings visually quote existing racial and gender hegemonies, allowing for more extreme scenes of domination and power and ultimately amplifying the consumer’s pleasure.
Porn affords the possibility of creating unattainable sexual scenarios, thereby fulfilling sexual desires that viewers may wish to experience but which may not necessarily be feasible or acceptable outside of the digital world. Race serves as one example for viewers who feel opposed or unable to engage in interracial sex in their actual lives. Other top search terms on Pornhub from 2018 include “cartoon,” “fortnite,” “anime,” and “overwatch,” indicating sexual relations in animated worlds with fictional characters, as well as “milf,” “step mom,” “mom,” and “teen,” which allude to the risque appeal of an age gap. The search terms describe content which visualizes impossible or illegal sexual relations between humans, indicating that many viewers watch porn as a means of escapism or fantasy fulfillment.
Perhaps the taboo nature of risque porn makes the films even more appealing and satisfying to the viewer. The idea that the relationship in the porn film could never truly be experienced freely and unashamedly off-screen makes for a much more exciting experience. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who researches sex and love, coined the term “frustration attraction,” which refers to the phenomenon in which rejection heightens feelings of attraction towards a person. Fisher notes that frustration attraction has a biological basis, as levels of dopamine increase the longer an expected desire is left unfulfilled.
In the context of pornography, the consumer receives more pleasure from watching risque porn because the painful unattainability of the sexual experience is juxtaposed with the content displayed on screen. By virtually experiencing the sexual act through the image, the consumer fantasizes about the possibility of engagement while paradoxically “experiencing” the illicit act. Yet knowing that they could never have such a risque experience in real life, they have a heightened desire to obtain the experience and derive an even greater amount of pleasure from viewing the pornography. Fisher’s theory also suggests that those who watch the risque porn despite not wanting to experience the sexual act in reality would still have a more pleasurable experience, as the film’s illicit nature is enough to trigger the same increased response of pleasure.
Like pornography, some Dutch paintings construct imagined scenarios to better appeal to their audience’s desires. Still lifes of flower bouquets exemplify this “imagining” of the natural world, in part due to their unparalleled value in the Netherlands during the 17th century. Like other commercial goods, the Dutch began importing flower bulbs from outside of Europe. Flowers quickly became a luxury item, the most popular varieties selling for up to 35,000 stuivers apiece. Unlike other material objects the Dutch could purchase, flowers had a limited shelf-life, only retaining their beauty for a few days. A such, the flower still life painting was especially precious, as it preserved the beauty of the flower in an image that could be enjoyed forever.
Plate 3: Ambrosius Bosschaert,
Still Life With Flowers
, 1609.
Evident in the stunning realism of Amborsius Bosschaert’s flower bouquets [Plate 3] and the luxurious banquets of other artists, Dutch still life creates the illusion of a real image, its realism and intricate detail akin to that of a photograph. However, while the paintings certainly feature elements from everyday life in the Netherlands, the image itself was either staged or construed from the imagination of the artist; the painting’s realism becomes crucial for crafting a convincing illusion. The still life is a fantasy of reality, and its visual realism combined with the knowledge of its unattainability exacerbates the desire and pleasure of the viewer.
Dutch still life artists never painted from model flower bouquets. In fact, as Bergstrom notes, artists painted with such careful detail that the flowers would have wilted far before they could actually complete the painting. Artists such as Bosschaert, who was well-known for his work with flowers, conducted studies on flowers individually, and later used their preliminary drawings to compose unique bouquets of flowers from their imaginations. Bosschaert simultaneously depicted tulips, roses, lilies, irises, grape-hyacinths, carnations, and fritillaries all within the same painting and with the same beautiful, flawless perfection. He almost exclusively painted cultivated blossoms rather than wild flowers. This technique allowed artists to feature flowers that bloom during different seasons and from different regions of the world, and to depict perfect, blemish-free blossoms. In reality, such pristine, diverse bouquets could never exist. Additionally, the bouquets in Bosschaert’s paintings often appear monstrously enormous, ardently bursting out of the image into the real world and often overwhelming their rather small vases, challenging the laws of physics in addition to the temporal constraints.
The innate impossibility of the still life bouquets indicated that they were ideal images constructed from figments of the artists’ imaginations, meant to fulfill the material desires of the Dutch. The constructed images of flower bouquets had an alluring appeal precisely because they could not exist in reality for temporal and physical reasons. Despite the new consumerist culture of the Netherlands during the 17th century, in which people could own previously unattainable material goods, no amount of money could purchase the imagined bouquets of artists. A paradox exists in the image, as the realism of the painting style creates the illusion that the bouquet could exist in reality — and perhaps to an untrained eye the flowers would appear to have been painted from a tangible display model — but to Dutch consumers the fantasy could only be purchased and experienced through the image itself.
Like the Dutch paintings of flower bouquets, modern porn films bring fantasies to life by constructing imagined sexual scenarios which appeal to the desires of the audience and idealize the act of sex. The allure of porn is not necessarily about its accurate, truthful portrayal of sex, but rather the fact that it offers the opportunity to experience intimacy and physical pleasure in an ideal fantasy scenario, without the work required to have real-life sex. Porn films gloss over the unattractive, painful, and unappealing aspects of sex, presenting a concentrated core of idealized sex, ensuring that the viewer can enjoy the film and receive maximum pleasure.
In creating imagined images of unattainable physicality and temporality, both Dutch still life and pornographic films incite a heightened pleasurable response from the audiences of their respective time periods. Filmmakers of pornography create work which appeals to the desires and fantasies of the consumers, just as the Dutch painters created impossible still life paintings of objects of great luxury and pleasure for people in the Netherlands. Yet despite their shared quest to fulfill the desires of their audiences, the two genres have vastly different focuses within the realm of pleasure reflected in their modes of consumption.
Dutch still life paintings were viewed from within the privacy of a home as an ornamental decoration, only accessible by the homeowners and the guests they chose to invite into their home. Displayed in a living room or dining room, the painting became integrated into the visual landscape of an individual, serving as a token of one’s affluence. Yet unlike prints, another popular art form in the Netherlands during the 17th century, the size of the paintings meant that they could be viewed by multiple people at a time. Modern art museums allow for the same manner of consumption, permitting multiple people to view the same painting in the same space. In contrast, video pornography exists on the Internet and can be accessed by anyone, but is usually viewed privately by one individual. Because a porn video can be “reproduced” for consumption on any number of digital devices, multiple people can watch the same video simultaneously while remaining oblivious to other viewers. Viewers choose to view porn in separate spaces rather than viewing the same image or video together, perhaps out of embarrassment or fear of the criticism they may face.
The differences in viewing practices between the two media types indicate a hierarchy of acceptance in regard to pleasure. Both Dutch still life and porn provide pleasure for the viewer, but the former celebrates indulgence in materialistic pleasure while the latter supplies sexual pleasure. Pornographic content requires the audience to extract pleasure from watching other humans pleasuring themselves, reflecting the viewer’s desire back onto them as a kind of voyeuristic mirror. It strips away the protection of the “image screen,” which art critic Hal Foster indicates “mediates the gaze of the world for us… capturing the gaze… and taming it in images,” and forces us to directly confront the repulsive aspects of our own sexual pleasure. Dutch still life also provides a reflection of the viewer’s desires, but in a way which converts the subject of pleasure into beautiful inanimate objects, subverting the gaze. While pornography and Dutch still life employ similar techniques for delivering pleasure, their focus on differing realms of pleasure establish an blatant distinction between the two, giving one membership to the circle of high art while relegating the other to pixels on a screen. Comparing the two forms of media gives us insight into the universal strategies at work in pleasure-inducing media, but also forces us to consider hierarchies of pleasure in visual media.