The Seductive Kaleidoscope

How would you feel about eating your dinner under the slow, hypnotic spell of a giant, multi-coloured penis kaleidoscope? The crowd at Sketch think you’d love it! As proved by the video installation currently being projected across their uber-chic dining room, which plays on your perversity and voyeurism to challenge the representation of the male body in society. Dazed Digital meets the French artist, VJ and former Dazed stylist Cecile Emmanuelle Borra to talk about penises, male stereotyping, and stylistic art vs. conceptual fashion…

Dazed Digital: How are you changing the representation of the male body through this piece?
Cecile Emmanuelle Borra: I wanted to reverse the gaze, as a response to the over-sexualisation of the female body in society, but I also wanted to represent female desire, and that’s why I wanted to concentrate on the penis. The way that a man is portrayed throughout history is loaded with different connotations. I don’t think that the traditional artistic representation of man particularly encourages female desire, even when photographed with an erect penis, because that’s sometimes seen as too aggressive. I wanted to create something that was easily approachable, something soft, but still consuming the male body. The movement works as an aesthetic trick in this way.

DD: Why are there no black penises?
Cecile Emmanuelle Borra: There is a black penis section in there! It’s one of the black and white kaleidoscopes. In fact there are only three penises in the whole film, and they’re manipulated in different ways so it’s harder to tell. I invited a few guys to sit in front of me with their pants down, I photographed them, and I worked with the images, cutting them, making montages and experimenting. I made one huge collage with flowers in black and white, which was quite gothic, but it ended up looking a bit scary.

DD: Does Kaleidoscope balance the over-sexualisation of the female body?
Cecile Emmanuelle Borra: The female body has been used like an object throughout history and society, in advertising, in art, everywhere. The male body is starting to be used more in that way, but just re-enacting stereotypes, using the most clichéd representation of what a male should be - the most masculine, or the most muscular – to sell products. It’s something I’m also criticising because it’s not helping; the media is just accentuating the gender divide.

DD: You worked in the fashion industry, and even as a stylist for Dazed in the 90s, so there’s a bit of a dichotomy there… 
Cecile Emmanuelle Borra: Yes, my background is in fashion, and it’s something that’s still very much in my blood. Perhaps it’s a love-hate relationship, because I’m also aware of the manipulation at work, but I am sensitive towards fashion as an art form. I still feel like I’m working like a stylist with the way I approach my artwork, like an art-stylist, for example with my latest installation using found objects. But the way I approach fashion is conceptual, I was using photography and styling to say something when I was styling: I didn’t care if I was using Prada or Oxfam, and although I respect designers’ work, I didn’t feel like I wasn’t there to sell them.

DD: Don’t you think a lot of the industry plays on female desire towards other women, and jealousy between women?
Cecile Emmanuelle Borra: It’s very true, yes. Germaine Greer said she found it very peculiar how throughout history, the representation of female desire goes through their own bodies. Heterosexual men represent their desires through women, but the representation that you have of the male body is only really through gay men. In the 60s and 70s and during the rise of feminism, female artists wanted to reclaim their own bodies in a way that they weren’t allowed to throughout art history, by painting themselves and other women. But 50 years later there’s no progression, there’s so much of it around and still this dependence on our body image, which I find very problematic.

DD: Which other feminists are influencing your work at the moment?
Cecile Emmanuelle Borra: I find the work of [post-feminist YBA] Sarah Lucas very witty and very fresh, also into Josephine Meckseper, who talks about consumption, like me, using window displays where everything’s for sale. I’m reading the Spanish philosopher Beatriz Preciado, and Laura Mulvey who wrote about women in cinema. Then there’s [contemporary Swiss artist] Sylvie Fleury, who talked about her work as both “adhesion et critique” [support and criticism]: I think this relates to mine also.

Kaleidoscope is currently exhibited at Sketch, closing mid-August. 

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