How would our world today be different if one adventuresome woman had travel back in time and had glorious sexual practice with every single US president ? Time - traveling creative person Justine Lai is about to find out .
In a serial of paintings call “ Join or Die , ” Lai depicts herself having sex with every U.S. president , in chronological ordering . Though she probably has n’t been learn Connie Willis ’ novel Lincoln ’s Dreams , or any of Harry Turtledove ’s oeuvre , but she is on a mission to transmute our understanding of the past . In her artist ’s argument , she writes :
In Join Or kick the bucket , I paint myself have gender with the Presidents of the United States in chronological order . I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by address their public legacies and secret lives . The administration itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution ; by inserting myself in its timeline , I attempt to situate something informal and mortal . I apply this intimacy to subvert authorization , but it demand that I make myself vulnerable along with the President of the United States . A baron lies in turn in these patriarchal figure the possible object of shame , derision and desire , but it is a power that is perpetually negotiated .
I come near the spectacle of sexual practice and politics with a certain playfulness . It would be wanton to lease the figure slide into territory that ’s strictly adult - the lurid and hardcore , the predictably “ controversial . ” One could also conceive of a serial preoccupied with get into its “ Fuck the Man ” symbolism on its sleeve . But I wish to move beyond these thing and make something playful and ship’s boat and peradventure a fiddling ambiguous , but ebulliently so . This , I find , is the most humanizing act I can do .
This is a delicious and unexpected shape of alternate chronicle . I specially care the way she says this is n’t a simple “ have sex the adult male ” subject matter , but is instead about help us to remember that nifty U.S. leaders were soul like everyone , fragile and vulnerable .
So far , Lai ’s only up to Ulysses S. Grant in her diachronic odyssey , but as you’re able to see below he was a pretty frisky fellow . We ’ve get a few highlights from her serial publication below .
you may see more atJustine Lai ’s on-line art gallery .
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