TITLE    : Imagined Horrors
STORYID  : imagined-horrors
SUMMARY  : The Art of Georges Pichard.
AUTHOR   : Cal Y. Pygia@lit
DATE     : 2009-02-04
CATEGORY : reviews-and-essays
FLAGS    : 
TAGS     : |art|erotic art|bondage|bdsm|sex|


Full of breasts and hips and wide of thigh, the women in the artwork of Georges Pichard (1920-2003) somewhat resemble those of the expatriate underground comics illustrator Robert Crumb. Like Crumb, Pichard also puts his damsels in distress through their paces, and his treatment of them is often cruel, punitive, and degrading. In Pichard's world, there is no doubt but that men are in charge; they take their dominant social and political status so much for granted that they never bat an eye when they subject women to their brutal and pitiless, usually humiliating and vicious, behavior.



In one picture, a maid brings a tray bearing a bottle of wine and a full goblet to a man who is dressed in a suit, a tie, and wingtip shoes. The maid wears nothing but a flower in her hair and an apron that is too small to conceal either her breasts or her hairless labia. Feathers from the duster inserted through her anus make her appear even more ridiculous than her immodest dress alone would be apt to do. However, the man, smiling as he reaches for the glass of wine on the tray, reveals no sense of consciousness regarding anything improper in the woman's attire. Moreover, he takes no notice of the woman, dressed in the manner of a child, who kneels before him, wearing a hat, a dress, socks, and shoes, servicing the erection that juts from the open fly of his trousers, while, her hands clasped before her, the very picture--but for the presence of the penis and her act of fellatio--of innocence and modesty.



It is a rare occasion, indeed, when the vagina and the anus of a woman in a Pichard illustration is not occupied by a penis or a penis substitute, and the French artist is nothing if not innovative and imaginative in his use of phalli for this purpose: metal pins, tongues, funnels, dildos, pumps, pipes, cucumbers, nozzles, broom handles, fingers, phallic hydrant arms, spindles, flowers, feather dusters, posts, stringed beads, jacks, a tube to a bellows, wooden stakes, scepters, metal rods, and even the horn of a gramophone are some of the instruments that he substitutes for the penis. Frequently, their diameters are uncomfortably, even painfully or dangerously, large. 



For the victims, punishment and torture are always the ends, not sexual pleasure, and many of the unfortunate women in Pichard's drawings are pierced through the nasal septum, the tongue, the nipples, the labia, the navel, and such other body parts as the breasts and the upper arms, so that they might be fitted with straight pins, safety pins, rings, bells, and padlocks.



In one picture, a woman's labia are sewn shut, and, in several others, one or more women sport lacerations from having been whipped or exhibit the scars of their owners' branding irons. They wear fetters, manacles, and chains, or are kept in narrow cages or in wooden stocks. They may also be punished by having wooden stakes or a metal pins hammered up their anuses; by being forced to sit upon sharp metal projections; by being suspended by the wrists or ankles from ropes or chains; by having their feet draped over the trapezes to which they are bound by their wrists; by being bound in a back-bending, doubled-over position; by being penned inside a close, narrow cage; by being hoisted by their ankles on a pulley while their wrists are bound behind their backs; by having their wrists bound to their ankles while they are lying prone; by being bound back to back with another woman; by being spread eagled upside down; by being bound in a fetal position; by being shackled atop an anus-penetrating device; by being chained with hooks or rings through the tongue, nipples, or labia; by being burned with irons heated in live coals; by having floods of water poured through funnels inserted into their mouths or rectums; or by being subjected to a variety of other torments and tortures.



In one scene, a well-whipped naked woman performs fellatio upon a portly gentleman in a bowler hat, suit, and tie, while, seated in a chair, he watches a woman in a short, skin-tight dress, her nipples erect, torture another, younger nude woman. The hapless victim lies upon her shoulders, her arms secured behind her back, a triangular bar gouging into the small of her back, with her right leg, doubled under her, its foot nailed to the wooden platform upon which she lies and out of which arises a wooden post.



Her left leg, extended alongside the pillar, is held in place against it by thick metal bands around her thigh, calf, and ankle which are attached to her by metal pins that run through both the bands and her leg. The victim cannot lower her head to the floor, because a rope around her neck extends to her labia, where its end is attached to a sharp metal hook that curves into the top of her vagina; if she lowers her head, the resulting tension will tighten the little slack in the rope, causing the hook to sink into the tender tissues of her sex.



Nor is this the extent of the victim's suffering, for her female tormentor turns a lever that causes a sharp cone to drill slowly into the muscle in the back of the victim's calf, while, at the same time, drawing the metal band around her lower leg closer and closer to the post so that her leg must break in at least two places--calf and ankle. A third woman looks on, her lips sewn shut around a length of wood.



Claustrophobic closeness is a feature of many of these drawings. In one, a nude woman, arms bound behind her back, kneels inside a vertical cage that, fitted with short legs, is less than three feet high. Its width and depth are only a little larger than those of her body. The top of the cage is equipped with a space through which her head fits. She watches another naked woman, chained to the ceiling by fetters on her wrists, her arms bent painfully behind her back, hop and skip as she is thrashed by a man wielding a heavy cane.



In another drawing, a naked woman, a metal pipe inserted through her anus and well into her rectum; her labia pierced and closed by a padlock; the ring at the lower end of a chain inserted through her clitoris and the hook at the upper end of the same chain piercing her tongue;, the backs of her thighs branded, the left with a "P," the right with an "M," has her left leg bent over her shoulders. The other leg extends to her front, bending at the knee, and is held aloft by its being joined to her raised right arm by a manacle that bridges the space between both extremities. Her other arm is also raised, and joined by a horizontal bar to its elevated twin.



The effect of these chains, manacles, and bars is to keep her rolled into a ball. She is unable to lift her head (without tearing both her tongue and her clitoris); she is unable to lower her arms or legs; she is unable to straighten her spine or reduce the pressure on her creased and folded belly; and she is unable to adjust her weight or shift her position. When the front of the box she occupies is closed, she is in utter silence and visible, if at all, only through the small, round window cut into the front of the door. To look at this and similar pictures is to gaze into the claustrophobic hell of extreme discomfort from cramped paralysis inside close and stifling spaces and to know, once and for all time, what being not only imprisoned but also trapped truly means.



Sexually, these damsels in distress are compelled to service men (and less often, other women) by submitting to anal, oral, or vaginal intercourse. Sometimes, they must participate in all these acts simultaneously, with groups of men and women. One woman will sometimes assist a man, holding his cock to the other, younger woman's mouth and placing a hand atop the fellatrice's head as she services her lord and master or thrusting a broom handle or other object back and forth through her anus or vagina while she performs fellatio.



Women also defecate and urinate to provide food and drink for other women's consumption. Urine is not only a beverage in Pichard's pictures, but it is also a body wash of sorts, for many women urinate copiously upon younger, helpless female victims. Semen, too, is a common nectar.



The masturbation of women, by themselves and one another, is a common amusement, performed, again, for the benefit of voyeuristic men more than for the satisfaction of the masturbators themselves. In a few drawings, Pichard has experimented with sex between women and such animals as a donkey, a pig, a ram, a chimpanzee, an ape, and a dog.



Pichard drew many pictures if women being tortured, and the imagination behind his grueling scenes is not only fascinating, but it is also both monstrous and horrific. What would make a man so relentlessly picture such tormenting punishments? A Freudian view of his art would suggest, certainly, a hatred for the opposite sex, for such loathing is evident in the specificity and the complexity of the torture devices and their effects that his work delights to show. The engines of torture, and the torture itself, as horrible as they are, are not what horrifies the viewer most. That claim goes to the mind that envisioned such abuse--that of the artist Georges Pichard himself--and to those of the individuals who view and are amused by such abuse--those of mine and, perhaps, of yours. 

