Pussy The Aurel Schmidt Purple Book

Aurel Schmidt
Pussy The Aurel Schmidt Purple Book

Photographs: Aurel Schmidt

Text: Alex Gatenfeld

Publisher: Purple Institute

68 pages

Year: 2010

Comments: Softcover, 29,7 x 21 cm, b&w photographs. In very good condition. Design: Gianni Oprandi.

"In an undated hand-written note reproduced in this book, an adolescent recalls meeting her ideal man. "I don't know at all what he's thinking, but I really don't give a fuck. I don't want to figure him out. I just want him." Maybe Aurel Schmidt is just boasting about her sexual appetite. But maybe, just maybe, she's hinting that she might not be totally fulfilled if she knew exactly what it was she was after. Aurel describes in great detail how the world "vanishes" for her unspoken attraction. Then she makes the most Freudian of slips: listing his inventory of sexual attractions - his face, body, and brain - as his "crudentials." It's important to Aurel that she count the ways she can be crude.

Aurel Schmidt spends a lot of time in her bedroom-cum-studio working on her bold signature figurative drawings - a smiley-face comprising two penises attached at their bases, a facemask formed with a young girl's tossed-off panties. Witness the crudeness of the drawings' scope and references: Morris Louis's late-modernist pours reproduced using menstrual fluid; Arcimboldo's kitschy fruit faces rendered in maggots. Then there's the questionable tastefulness and sophistication of Aurel's bold figurative drawing, and the heart-on-her-sleeve feminism culled from '70s and '80s-era bad punk poetry.

The photographs in this book chronicle Aurel's slow evolution into a sex-doll caricature, a naked bottle-blond with the unshaved armpits and the coke-bottle glasses. Her development has been well documented, and the sexualized image she's made of herself makes it clear that here is a pretty girl with something rather un-pretty underneath. Aurel's subjects are neither models nor the stuff of voyeuristic documentary photography; they're just the artist's friends, who, like the artist, have come to New York in order to make their livelihoods in the arts. And for that, they succumb to the ultimate crudeness: the desire to be looked at."

- Introduction text from the book written by Alex Gatenfeld

It was issued as a Supplement to Purple Fashion Magazine.