Art photographer Clayton Cubitt has taken Hysteria – a film about the creation of the vibrator – to a whole new level in his new video series titled Hysterical Literature.
There are two installments to the series, but they both follow the same scenario: a woman sits at a table with a book in front of her, states her name and begins to read from the pages. She then proceeds to become overcome by her words and the moans begin.
What is never made clear is what has caused the woman to orgasm, offering a variety of possibilities ranging from a mysterious buzzing sound that can be heard throughout the video, the question of whether there is there somebody under the table, or whether the simple act of reading has produced this pleasurable result.
Cubitt addressed this very question in a recent interview with Salon.
‘I won’t divulge explicit technique, but the assistant is equipped with a back massager and instructed to distract the reader,’ he said.
When talking about his series, Cubitt also revealed that the readers are allowed to choose what they want to read in the video.
‘I simply ask them to choose something personally meaningful to them, and something long enough to read from,’ he said. ‘We’ve had everything from Walt Whitman to a science book on fungus.’
He also explained that everything filmed is done in only one take, with no edits taking place after the filming.
‘It’s quite interesting to hear about what was going through their mind as they started to lose track of what they read and surrendered to their bodies,’ he said. ‘They talk about it almost like it becomes a religious trance, and they usually have no recollection of the last half of the reading.’
Cubitt says the idea for Hysterical Literature came to him as he observed the modern trends developing in portraiture such as Facebook self-portraits and incessant Instagram self-documentation.
‘What is left for the portraitist to reveal? How can we break through to something real?’ he questions. ‘So I’ve had several projects related to distracting the sitter from their practiced poses into something more akin to reality, albeit an artificially engineered veneer of it….These are all attempts to see something they’re not trying to show me.’
The title behind the project gets its name from the Victorian medical theory known as ‘Hysteria’, where vibrators were used to cure ‘hysterical’ women.
‘On an individual level, I’m interested in the battle the sitter experiences between mind and body, and how long one retains primacy over the other, and when they reach balance, and when they switch control,’ he said. ‘On a larger scale, I’m interested in how society draws a line between high and low art, between acceptable topics of discussion and taboo ones, between what can be worshiped and what must be hidden.’
One of the films features porn performer Stoya reading from Necrophilia Variations by Supervert, the other features an unknown woman named Alicia who reads from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
