At the Seattle Aquarium with a 4-year-old nephew, I gazed at an octopus running its tentacles across the clear glass limitations of its world and mused on its representations in art.
(Click images to enlarge.)
Jeff Wall photographed one in 1990, but his is the road not taken.
In a spare and bleak room, it’s an untidy knot of formerly organic matter grown dried and leathery, like a baseball glove forgotten in the back of a closet. It evokes the disarray of abandonment, not to the thrill of a species-to-species encounter.
In the Western world, octopi live in fantasy as monsters. In the East, they are monsters on a mission. (Hokusai; not safe for work.)
Masami Teraoka (also not safe for work) added condoms. His are comic emblems of the orgasmic. Woody Allen once said that sex was the most fun he ever had without laughing. Teraoka’s fetishists of the sea bring these pleasurable opposites together.
Daikichi Amano – If a little is good, more is better.
Also hitting that Japanese fish & sex note is Hajime Sorayama.
Lastly, for the carny touch: Germs4u.
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