Some rehearsing: A bit (not) to taste

While taking notes on the essays in Appropriation (I worked from later sections to earlier sections in reverse order), I came across an image in Breton and Eluard's essay The Object of a ball.

"Objects with symbolic functions were envisaged following the mobile and silent objects: Giacometti's suspended ball which reunited all the essential principles of the preceding definition, but still retained the methods proper to sculpture." (A, 31).

I have been thinking about mouths open and closed, and ways they might be forcefully opened or closed, as a central image for my routine. The image of Giacometti's ball made me think of ball gags, which are an intense way for mouths to be forcefully open and yet blocked. The item is question can help elicit many different moods- it can be used to make a scene tragic, dangerous, sexy or comedic. 

Image from t-shirt found online of ball gag and a slogan of sorts.

More often than not images of ball gags are used for comedic effect. Episodes of the recently canceled Ugly Betty had a "love dungeon" stocked with clothing and sex toys associated with S&M sex culture. Paddles, whips, ball gags are all props that poke fun at the excesses of two magazine tycoons, Fay Summers and Bradford Meade. The audience is supposed to find this funny because Fay and Bradford are powerful and because they were old and still "getting it" on this non-normative way. Part of the humor comes from the transgressions of implied "shoulds." The powerful should be in more control of themselves (S&M despite being all about control tends to symbolize lack of control/excess when used comedically). The old should not be getting it on.   I think this is similar to how fat people are used in our popular media- they are often used for comedic effect, and it involves all sorts of shoulds.

This is important because our policy issues boil down to arguments about what we should and shouldn't do. 

Giacometti's ball lead to me to ball gags. The image of the mouth forced open but blocked is potent. I began searching for images of ball gags. I specifically wanted images of men's mouths opened and blocked with the ball gag. It is surprising to me, especially considering the ration of submissive men in S&M culture, that a Google image search did not turn up many images of men with ball gags in their mouths in the first few pages- and I was specifically querying "men with ball gags in their mouths." But it did turn op the image of the t-shirt that I inserted above (I'm not sure if every one will see this as I laid it out due to folks email programs).

And it turned up an image labeled "The Fat Man's Ball."

I decided to try to put them together in some way. The Fat Daddy Capitalists- here a figure of satire- with the sly, slightly witty slogan professing membership in a S&M sex culture. But first I wanted to be about both food and speech.

And then I wanted the slogan to be like a cummerbund on one of the "fat daddy" figures which I made into a melting mass- sort of a homage to Cadmus's images of Gluttony. Obviously, my photoshop skills are limited, but it gets a bit of the effect I want.