print   back What I know about Penises This was a long one, with a bend noticeably to the right. It was my first time getting a clear look at it; up to this point we had been in semi-darkness or under the covers or I wasn’t paying attention or wasn’t supposed to pay attention. It looked sad (problem). How can a penis look sad? Hair at the base, a line running around the middle of the shaft where the foreskin might have been. The bottom skin was dark, the top light, as if the racial divide had happened horizontally in space. I thought ‘what would it be like to be a penis’ and stopped myself from separating out the part from the whole. ‘What would it be like to have one?’ There was a silence. The penis was shriveled now, and looked sadder, though I know it was nothing of the sort. I got to the job at hand. 1) The average size of a penis is 5.9 inches when erect. The largest natural human penis ever recorded was 11 inches. The largest penis in the animal kingdom is 11 feet. Odors that increase blood flow to the penis are lavender, licorice, chocolate, pumpkin pie and donuts. Donuts. 2) I once loved a man for his penis. It was long, elegantly proportioned, with clean lines and firmly hard when erect which was often. It was uncomplicated; the man was not. After we broke up I’d get pangs of regret; I would never see or experience his penis again. The man is married now and has two daughters. When I was with him he was working for NASA. Now he’s a gynecologist. 3) It’s easy to draw a penis. 4) Each day, like everyone else, I get between 10 and 20 e-mails about my penis size. People who send me these e-mails include: Carol I. Pate, Melanie Root, Melva K. Bellamy, Sybill Gregg, Minerva K. Smithie, Minerva A. Xiong, Ruthann Manie, Gapard Dunbar and Stewart E. Flowers. The e-mails take the tone of a friend of a friend; they are enthusiastic, encouraging and often grammatically unusual. They don’t use the word penis, referring instead to ’love stick’ ’trouser python’ ’Joyrangybodypart.’ Today’s e-mail informs me: “A small willy makes a man feel diffident.” Diffident comes from the Latin diffidere ’to mistrust’. Meaning (adj.): 1) Reserved, unassertive. 2) Hesitant in acting or speaking through a lack of self confidence. 5) The French have the most slang words for penis. (Why is this?) Among them, in translation: asparagus, cigar, cigar with moustache, chimney sweeper, comma, fish, flute, large bald person with turtleneck, leek, Jesus, maggot, painful one, radish, saxophone with moustache, sausage, small bird, soldier, spaghetti, sparrow, thing, tiny, tongue, weasel, missile, zizi. 6) Dream. I am sitting at the head of a large table in a corporate-looking conference room filled with people. I don’t recognize anyone. As per usual in my dreams I am inexplicably naked, or at least naked from the waist up. I look around nervously, hoping no one will notice while mentally kicking myself for forgetting to wear a shirt. Again. The noise level, which had grown unbearable, suddenly dips. I see a curtain moving to my right. My boss whispers seductively behind me (what boss?) ‘Lift the curtain. Go on. Lift the curtain and see what’s behind it.’ I get up to do so Ð damn. I’m bare ass naked except for a pair of dirty threadbare yellow socks (why?). I lift the curtain and see a light in the distance coming over the horizon. The light turns into a perfectly shaped white and black missile with a red tip coming straight at the floor to ceiling window I’m standing at. I try to run away, and another great standard kicks in. My legs don’t work; I can’t move. An internal struggle ensues which seems to extend for minutes, to no avail. Before dying in a burst of glass and light, I wake up. How can people dream such shit. 7) I had a friend named Zizi once. 8) I sit here trying to remember penises I’ve known. It is almost impossible for me to put a memory of a past lover’s face together with his penis. Just as it is impossible to remember the sensations experienced. Can one remember orgasm? I am left with memories like ‘felt good’ ‘went on for too long’ ‘quick’ ‘nice’ on which to embellish. ‘Cold.’ ‘Small pebbles attached to ass when I stood up.’ ‘Almost got caught.’ ‘Got caught.’ ‘Little daughter of our host, mouth open, staring from the doorway. How long has she been standing there?’ ‘White dog growling.’ 9) I was on the A train sitting across from a man with tight white knit pants. He had an enormous penis which the pants delineated well; it reached at least mid-thigh. This was the 80’s when everything was closer to the surface in New York. Tightwhitepantsman sat with his legs spread and seemed to be staring straight at me. I remember wondering if his penis was hard and deciding that it wasn’t. How large would it become when engorged? What was he thinking when I was thinking this? We rode this way, together, face to face, for 6 stops. Did he see me looking at him? Of course. The brakes screeched, the lights went out, the train stopped. I turned my head to verify, 42nd Street. When I turned back, he was gone. Instantly. Replaced by a fat child, a boy with ugly pudgy knees. 10) Information haphazardly accumulated too early (trauma): a medical book on skin disease housed in the left bottom corner of the bookshelf in the dining room. Early access to black and white images of a variety of penises, some close up, others cropped at the stomach or chest. The penises: bloated, blackened, with huge pustules, partially eaten away, almost unrecognizable. Feh. 11) I often use the image of a penis in my work. I tell people it’s because it’s an underused image. Which is true. Is it also to annoy people? Anyway, it does. It mostly annoys heterosexual men. Using this image makes me feel less diffident. Or the opposite of diffident. 12) Museums, curators, exhibition spaces, critics and writers have an easier time accepting images of flaccid penises than erect ones. This is something I’ve had direct experience with. Whereas I get more pleasure using the erect ones. Is this because they feel there is something inherently unaesthetic (adj. violating aesthetic canons or requirements; deficient in tastefulness or beauty) about sexual arousal? That it’s too base, biological, involuntary or uncontrollable to be a source or subject of artistic exploration? Granted, in the United States we are laboring under a regime where any display of sexuality on the part of a public institution can be taken as an opportunity to attack, thus conveniently turning attention away from other issues like war, national and personal debt, climate change and our failing economy. There are heavy risks involved in transgressing what society deems as ‘acceptable’ and I understand that most people do not want to take these risks. What I find most worrisome is that many institutions and individuals have come to personally identify with and believe in this prudishness. “How is this work different than pornography?” Regardless of my answer, is pornography (the writing of whores), by definition, never art? 13) “Turn your small knob into a huge meat stick!” 14) Something I know a lot about but shouldn’t: photos of penises used on craigslist.org in the ’men seeking men’ section. I divide these presentations into three (rough) categories: a) Men who, like savvy fruit sellers, display their penises. The typical photo: a close-up or extreme close-up of a penis cradled in a man’s hand, the light and angle used to maximize/accentuate the object’s finest attributes. Roundness, firmness, color. The hand provides a size referent. b) Child-like men who display their penises as if it they were delightful discoveries. Hands on hips, backs arched, photos framed to catch the penis dead center. If faces are shown, they are grinning proudly at the camera or looking down in proprietary fascination. (It’s mine!) Fantastic. c) The how-to men, demonstrating with precision and attention to detail, “I want you to do this” or “Please put it here.” These photos are straightforward and usually brightly lit. They tend to be wider than those listed above, and often include stand-ins who help demonstrate/illustrate the desired activity. I love all three categories of photos, not only for their generosity, but for the rich details the edges afford: olive green refrigerator, chenille bedspread, paper towels with a border of tiny Santas, grey Boxer Joe’s heaped around ankles, fuzzy pink night lightÉ 15) The penis, if thought of in terms of time might represent the word “again.” A game lying in wait, to return to. Each play is similar, with the pleasure that repetition affords. And with each repeated play there is the contradictory promise of difference, new possibility, or at least permutation. In this way the idle penis of the present also reaches into past and future. Waiting it can be assigned the word ’maybe.’ 16) Why can’t I remember the feel of a penis inside me? Is this nature’s way of making me want to have the experience again, and then again? In a world increasingly based on boundaries, protection and the insistence on the individual, above all, it is a small miracle, or a huge one, that we still take part in the activity (custom) of putting a part of our bodies into the body of another or accept part of another’s body into our own. ’Taking a friend along to the circus,’ as the French say. How strange, and old fashioned, the allowing someone to enter us, here and there and maybe, if I really like you, there. Shelly Silver, NYC 2008 Pie Bible Editor M+M (Marc Weis and Martin de Mattia) Concept M+M Design Rosebud, Inc., M+M ca. 400 pages, ca. 350 ills. in color Flexible cover in imitation leather, 14,8 x 21 cm ca. 39,00, sFr 66,00 ISBN 978- 3- 938821- 81-7 With the Pie Bible the artistic duo M+M turns a fictitious book from the US movie “American Pie” into reality: a continually growing collection of experiences, tips and impressions with regard to love and sexuality. In the movie the book circulates at a high school. It is passed on from year to year to one selected, “worthy” pupil, who can add his own entry to it. For the “Pie Bible” M+M asked selected artists to reveal personal experiences, ingenious techniques and fantasies that lead to secret areas of the world of sensual lust and erotic abysses, because according to society’s general impression, artists are regarded as experts when it comes to en sexual experiences and initiation rites. Emmanuelle Antille • Marc Aschenbrenner • Tina Bara • Alfredo Barsuglia • Benjamin Bergmann • Olaf Breuning • Chicks on Speed • Cuoghi and Corsello • Carlos De los R’os • Jeanne Faust • Martin Fengel • Anna Gaskell • Nori toshi Hirakawa • John Isaacs • Michael Kalmbach • Julia Kissina • Ragnar Kjartansson • Peter Land • Alexander Laner • Monika Leitner/Khalid Nuhu Mohammadu • Inna Levinson • Joep van Lieshout • Lilli & Lola • Katarina Maciunas • Jonathan Meese • Sands Murray-Wassink • Mutter/Genth • Stefan Panhans • Richard Phillips • Cesare Pietroiusti • Miguel Rothschild • Shelly Silver • Gerd and Uwe Tobias • Stefan Wissel • Johannes Wohnseifer • Tobias Zielony/Laetitia Gendre • Ralf Ziervogel e.a. page top