Description
Handbook of the Spontaneous Other by Aikaterini Gegisian
Using cut-outs from National Geographic, tourist catalogues, and porn magazines from the 1960s and 1970s, Greek-Armenian artist Aikaterini Gegisian creates collages that present alternative, often humorous narratives about nature, female desire and pleasure.
In Handbook of the Spontaneous Other, Aikaterini Gegisian brings together a diverse range of found photographic material produced in Western Europe and the USA during the 1960s and 1970s.
“I read all these images as expressions of lifestyle culture, and lifestyle culture is an expression of consumerism,”
Composed of a series of 59 collages, the book playfully recontextualises images from popular culture that Gegisian has sourced — from pornographic magazines, tourist catalogues and National Geographic spreads — in order to subvert the way that the body, nature and pleasure have been represented in Western capitalist fantasies.
Divided into nine chapters that follow a metaphysical narrative of colour and sensation, the book ultimately seeks to locate a ‘spontaneous other’; a notion of the self and of pleasure that exists beyond the confines of popular culture and its dominant modes of representation.
