Aesthetics is – in direct opposition to the hedonic and the ascetic...
Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics: the sublime is contrasted with beauty. Beauty = harmony (and proportion) of form, and is within the non-conceptual realm of the re/presentable; whilst the sublime is the formless, it is excess and infinity: i.e. magnitude (“mathematical sublime”) and power (“dynamic sublime”).
“All of this”, for Kant, means that the aesthetics of the sublime is the “subjective” effect of trying to re/present what exceeds the comprehensive faculties of the mind. A thundering gap between apprehension and comprehension - which gives rise to the sublime aesthetic experience: a double-bind aporia: simultaneously made out of the necessary and hopeless effort of the “imagination” to estimate the magnitude/power of the sublime object (e.g. storm, war, pyramids, etc...) - paradoxically, this lacuna or hiatus is felt as: aesthetic pleasure.
But what are the post/modern objects of the sublime? What is sublime nowadays?
One object stands out among the many, the most sublime of all post/modern objects: Bukkake…
Bukkake is a sublime object, because of its excessive, disproportionate, explosive, and of course, volcanic modality.
Mainstream western video porn has always been obsessed with “the” ejaculating on the face of woman after coitus - the so called “money shot”. The whole affair seems pretty tame, and dare I say, quite boring, but not for the Japanese who/ seem to have a semen fetish to end all fetishes. In their usual fashion of taking western “technological values” (i.e. happy go lucky nihilism) to the extreme, they have taken the western porn’ “money shot” to the limit; hence, the pearly birth of Bukkake (recopied back into the west with a lucrative niche of its own).
According to some pseudo legend, Bukkake is an old Japanese tradition of punishment (the porn world loves tradition: “no ejaculation without tradition”…), in which women were punished for their “disrespect” by being isolated in some rundown location, and then sequentially ejaculated on by a group of on cuming males, (who// take it in turn to aim and project - usually the female face (Emmanuel Levinas would not be surprised) is the principle aim of the penal parade…
DVD Japan is taking this venerable tradition of semen ingrata to the limit; and when one takes any phenomenon, even the most trivial and banal, to the limit, it topples over into sublimity. Sublime excess; for which the imagination struggles to re/present “with” and “in” an adequate idea/frame: a sublime object is an object in constant need of, but perpetually failing, re/presentation:
Bukkake is no ordinary (beautiful) semen shower, the (female) object is not washing in “it” but bathing in “it”, or should I say, flowing in “it”? The female night is taken by a whiter shade of pale...
Flows of upon flows of molten lava hit the flesh, from head to toe. Flow pearls of thick viscosity transmogrify what was merely beautiful into the sublime formless of the disproportionate and the immense...
The thick viscous whiter than white transparently fusions the mundane skin beneath with an otherworldly ivory glow. However one tries to look at the gang-bang dream-shower scene, it is “almost” impossible to re/present within an adequate idea of rational perception - the sheer and banal quantity has been enlarged into an (aesthetic) quality unbeknown to the dollar signs participants...
The (aesthetic) spectator loses all grounds of comprehension and the aesthetic effect of the sublime takes over - at least if one is not lustfully or vicariously “participating” oneself. As Kant said, the aesthetic state is defined by its disinterestedness and contemplative enacting. One should keep all hands off, if one wants to experience the viscous sublime...
