6UL: Lust and Desire in Art and Design

by Clemens Meyer, Bettina Ruhrberg (Editor)

“Whose Jizz is this?” to make sense of the publication title, trust your college German and your phonetic ear. “Sexual,” here, comprises the entire broad spectrum of what we associate with carnal pleasure. Lust, desire, ecstasy, repression, obsession—the world of art, fashion, and design abounds with specimens of eroticism and sexuality in their infinite variety, shopworn stereotypes be damned. Looking back on the thorough revision of society’s ideas about sexuality in the past three decades, the book inquires into how the works of visual artists, fashion creatives, and designers reflect today’s public debates over biological and social gender roles, power structures, and sexual violence or the fading of taboos over sexual practices. With works and designs by Walter Van Beirendonck, Monica Bonvicini, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jürgen Klauke, Peaches, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Vivienne Westwood, and many more. This book documents a grand exhibition scheduled for the past summer at the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig, which had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

168 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2021

About the author

Meyer was born in 1977 in Halle an der Saale. His studies at the German Literature Institute, Leipzig, were interrupted by a spell in a youth detention centre. He has worked as a security guard, forklift driver and construction worker before he became a published novelist.

Meyer won a number of prizes for his first novel Als wir träumten (As We Were Dreaming), published in 2006,[2] in which a group of friends grow up and go off the rails in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He received the Rheingau Literatur Preis in 2006.

His second book, Die Nacht, die Lichter (All the Lights, 2008), was translated by Katy Derbyshire and published by independent London publisher And Other Stories in 2011.[3] It won the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2008.

Since then he has published his third book, Gewalten (Acts of Violence), a diary of 2009 in eleven stories, and a second novel called Im Stein (In Stone) in 2013 which was long-listed for the German Book Prize.