Mateas Pares: Could you tell us a little bit about the background of the artwork?
Åsa Cederqvist: This work is part of a series of photographs (Doughy Play) that I produced in 2015. These followed an artistic process I was involved in, where I explored corporeality, tactility, and a form of constant movement and language. I was, and am, interested in portraying that we are in constant becoming, and on a cellular level we are simultaneously dying all the time. And no matter how informal something seems to be, we are "programmed" to always read what we see, and what we read is based on what we have learned. I also wanted to create a language that was already in its form ambiguous and ambivalent, a kind of ”what am I seeing?”
How come it was the penis that got to portray this?
Haha, well you. It was actually just one of the guises I created in this session. When I made this series of photographs, it was like me and the dough having an encounter. I worked with different wheat doughs to experiment with different structures that could then also be eaten. I'm pretty uninterested in creating more images of hard cocks. They exist within us and around us anyway. I mean the concern for male potency permeates our society so much anyway I think. Takes up way too much space. It's a little too simple for my taste. It’s about time we reevaluate how we can and want to be, and what we recognize as desires. What could it be? That's where the dough comes in again. Because just like the dough, our bodies are in a way nothing more than a material, different cells that are structured in different ways that take different forms as needed. It is the intention and purpose behind their use that can be erotic, playful or, for example, threatening.
You mention that the cock is within us and around us — somehow omnipresent — and that you are therefore uninterested in creating more images of it. At the same time, it is probably the least sculpted part of the body; far behind faces, hands, arms, legs, feet, female breasts, and pussy. Do you agree, and if so, why do you think this body part is so charged that the threshold for portraying it is so much higher than any other body part? As you say, it is nothing more than just cells; a material.
Yes, images of the male body (and men) in various states are surprisingly absent. I think it can be so charged because men are not as schooled in showing themselves, and their bodies, vulnerable. Also, statistics say that people with cocks commit the most sexual violence, which means that the male genitalia itself is coded with a lot other than lust for many people.
DoughyPlay II by Åsa Cederqvist (2015, 55x40cm, digital print on paper)
I’m thinking of what you say about the cock being coded, while I'm looking at your work. The shape of the artwork borders on the abstract, and the title of the work doesn’t reveal that it’s a cock you are looking at either. If we wouldn’t have put the work in the context of this exhibition it would have been possible to think that one were looking at something else: a grill mitt, a pot, an upside-down old man. It can be said that the cock, therefore, has to rely on the viewer's association to create it and ultimately to encode it. How come you wanted to make it so vague, so to speak?
Absolutely, I deliberately allow the work to balance on an ambivalent border, as is my relationship with the male genitalia. Because I just wanted to point out that readings are so often in the eye of the beholder. Considerations that we often share. Our instincts have imprinted "ughh images" which we "try" on different things we see. The cock can be both desirable, fertile and sexy, but at the same time threatening and sad. Or a collection of cells. I personally call the picture the "penis picture" or ”the dildo" to keep track of it among the other images I took.
In the installation and the context (Gestures and Gaps, 2015, Wetterling Gallery) for which I made the series of images, this image played a very illustrative and at the same time abstract role; for some, it was very clear, and for others less clear. In the Gestures and Gaps series, I worked with a combination of play-abstraction-linguistics-desire-metabolism-lust. A kind of pyramid of needs that revolves around our instincts, and linguistics beyond the spoken language. I want to celebrate all kinds of linguistics and I claim that there should not be a hierarchy between physical and cognitive knowledge.
I also read about what the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty means about the phenomenological body (Phenomenology of Perception, 1962); that it is "always something other than what it is"; it is never "hermetically sealed". Bodies are open and permeable. Merleau-Ponty believes that the same processes that create an embodied consciousness also ensure that the body is never a static or stable entity, but is constantly changing; it is constantly in transformation.
Åsa Cederqvist (Photo: Lisa Björk)
In what way did you bring this into the actual production and making of this work?
When I work, I like to put myself in a different kind of state to get in touch with a kind of sensitivity that is beyond the rational and the judgmental, which we are so often preoccupied with. I can then arrive at results that have surfaced by themselves, which are created in a dialogue between my desires and my ideas, the material (the dough) and what frames the encounter (in this case the lens of the camera). It is dough, a collection of wheat, water and yeast. I knead the dough and create more life. I let it rest, letting the heat help the yeast swell. Tenderly, I knead and bake a loaf, which then turns into a severed arm, and in the force of my hands, a shape I think I recognize lands there, to be shaped in the next moment into a face and a landscape, and then…
Explore all artists and artworks from the exhibition COCKS!
Text and interview by Mateas Pares
