Painting and the pornographic: Marlene Dumas, Jenny Saville and plays of identifications

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1150163 (Table of Contents)

This thesis investigates and argues for instances of the affinity between painting and the pornographic traced in plays of identifications taking place in paintings of two contemporary women painters, Marlene Dumas and Jenny Saville.In the first part, it introduces debates araound pornography, the crisis of a systematically politicized issue of gender in these debates and the similarity of mentality in the elaboration of the female nude in the art/pornography opposition. In the rest of the thesis, shortcomings of thinking according to an opposition of art and pornography are argued through in relation to works of Dumas and Saville.Tracing their introduction of diffrent ways, the discontinuties of desire in the affinity between painting and the pornographic are explored. This thesis attempts to open up the problematic of the framing of bodies in images and the limits of thinking painting in terms of the art/pornography opposition to discussion through Dumas' and Saville's plays of identifications