What have Cabanel’s Birth of Venus, Klein’s Anthropometry, or Kusama’s Self-Obliteration in common? What relates Picasso’s Woman Pissing to Marlene Dumas’ watercolours and Tejal Shah’s Between the Waves? All these art works are deploying a wet aesthetics. This refers to an aesthetic experience that is realised by the perceptual interaction with wetness. What is remarkable of wet aesthetics, is that it affords a strong erotic or sexual resonance. This is not surprising; a wet aesthetics produces specific visceral effects in the viewer’s body.
Queer pornographic art has radicalized wet aesthetics in promising ways; it realises its visceral, motoric, and tactile potential in a liquifying, emancipatory, and sex-positive project. The viewer experiences queer pornography’s wet aesthetics as heating by melting. It radically decenters our subject/object experience and our fixed sexual identities, orientations, fetishes, and bodies. We are seduced into a sex-positive re-appropriation of bodily fluids, and our experience of desire and pleasure is reconstructed as dispossession, abundance, and surrender.
Petra van Brabandt is a Belgian philosopher of ethics and a porno specialist. She currently teaches at the St Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp and develops for her lecture an account on the aesthetic quality of fluids in pornographic art.
Today
Ongoing
Summer Term Break 2023
Information, 17 July – 13 October 2023
Winter Semester 2023/24
Information, 16 October 2023 – 9 February 2024
GROTTO – Graduate Show 2023
Exhibition, 14 – 30 July 2023
Hoor Al Qasimi: Sharjah Biennial 15. Thinking Historically in the Present
Lecture, 4 July 2023, 19:00
Manthia Diawara & Monika Szewczyk: AI: African Intelligence
Screening, 28 June 2023, 20:15
Lynn Rother: Uncanny provenance. Art history and its double
Lecture, 27 June 2023, 19:00
Slavs and Tatars: The Transliterative Tease
Lecture, 20 June 2023
Amt 45 i: Talks
Symposium, 17 June 2023, 14:00–20:30
another night in daimler
Konzert, 16 June 2023, 20:00
Jacqui Davies: Playing with Fire or the perils of working at the intersection of art and film
Lecture, 13 June 2023, 19:00
Willem de Rooij: King Vulture
Lecture, 6 June 2023, 19:00
Vittoria Martini & Thomas Hirschhorn: The Ambassador’s Diary
Talk, 1 June 2023
Tarek Lakhrissi: Beastangel
Lecture, 16 May 2023
Éric Baudelaire: When There is No More Music to Write (Lecture)
Lecture, 9 May 2023
Éric Baudelaire: When There is No More Music to Write (Screening)
Screening, 8 May 2023
Lectures Summer Semester 2023
Lecture, 2 May – 7 July 2023
Grada Kilomba: A conversation about the 35th Bienal de São Paulo
Lecture, 2 May 2023, 19:00
Summer Semester 2023
Information, 11 April – 14 July 2023
Admission Period for Full-time Studies in Fine Arts 2023/24
Information, 1 – 30 April 2023
Lap-See Lam "Tales of the Altersea" at Portikus
Exhibition, 11 March – 28 May 2023
Peter Weibel (1944–2023)
Information, 1 – 15 March 2023
Winter Term Break 2022/23
Information, 13 February – 10 April 2023
The Mensa is taking a break!
Information, 13 – 20 February 2023
Rundgang 2023
Exhibition, 10 – 12 February 2023, 10:00–20:00
Water Cooler Talks 2023
Lecture, 10 – 12 February 2023
Rundgang Film Program at DFF
Exhibition, 10 – 12 February 2023
Rundgang Party 2023
Party, 10 February 2023, 23:00
Rundgang Awards 2023
Information, 10 – 24 February 2023
On the Benefits of Friendship—A symposium in honor of Prof. Dr. Isabelle Graw
Symposium, 27 January 2023, 14:00–18:00
Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw: city limits
Lecture, 24 January 2023, 19:00
Christina Li: Time, dispossessed
Lecture, 17 January 2023, 19:00

Petra Van Brabandt: To Heat by Melting
Lecture 11 January 2017, 19:00 Aula, Städelschule, Dürerstraße 10, 60596 Frankfurt am Main