Budding eroticism

Mikhail Karasik’s art is featured in the ‘Dedicated to Bloom’ exhibit.

By Luisa Schulz

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: August 15, 2012 (Issue # 1722)

FOR SPT Mikhail Karasik’s exhibit is inspired by James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom.

A naked woman in a light flesh tone leans back, her hand descending between her legs. This picture, captioned “Dream,” is one of many on show at the “Dedicated to Bloom” exhibition, which opened at the Nabokov Museum on Aug. 13. It displays litographic works by Mikhail Karasik, who drew inspiration from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

“It’s not really illustrations of literature, it’s just associations evoked by literature,” said Karasik as he explained the concept of the “artist’s book,” his specialty and the subject of the exhibition.

Although dedicated to Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom, whose excessive erotic fantasies caused the landmark novel’s initial ban in the United Kingdom, the exhibition does not restrict itself to a single libido. Another room displays acts of the Russian Silver Age, while a third room takes the spectator to the boudoirs of the Middle East. Thus, the exhibition undertakes a little erotic trip around the world, comparing the concupiscence of different cultures.

Curvy pictures of Molly Bloom, Leopold’s wife, and glimpses of her buttocks set the tone for the “Dedicated to Bloom” (2003) album reflecting Leopold Bloom’s erotic fantasies. Aside from her, the series features beefy whores, Bloom’s teenage daughter Milly and his seaside fantasy Gerty, who is pictured in a romantic ocean embrace with Bloom as the waves rise up to their waists to insinuate Blooms’s famous orgasm.

Reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s 1935 erotic illustrations to Ulysses, Karasik’s attempt is more focused on color, with erotic tension being concentrated in pink tones. Particularly intriguing is Karasik’s technique to combine lithography with previous photomontage, using pornographic photo material from the very eras he depicted. The women on display should thus really resemble the pornographic pictures allegedly collected by Bloom in the novel.

Pornographic archives were also a source of the series “The Silver Age. Russian Types” (2004), the women, whose acts are more enigmatic and blurred than in the Bloom album, are bathed in shades of blue and patches of green. This is the only series displaying a few male acts, including men at a banya.

“Rich earthly colors, naive style and yearning but august postures are characteristic of the lithographs of the third album, “The Arab Eros” (1998)”

It is interesting to note that none of Karasik’s albums would have been on show in the societies they explore. In the Silver Age, erotic art was censored, as it was in early 20th-century Ireland. In Arab countries, acts are banned even today. “The Arab Eros pictures are of course a bit of a provocation,” says Karasik. “In Arab countries, it is even forbidden to use the word eros.”

Had he chosen slightly different erotic motives, he might also have upset the Petersburg authorities.

The exhibition “Dedicated to Bloom” runs through Sept. 3. at the Nabokov Museum at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, M. Admiralteiskaya. Tel. 315 4713.