In a relatively recent essay, published on the occasion of the consecrating exhibition dedicated to Osvaldo Lamborghini by the MACBA in Barcelona, Paul B. Preciado inscribes the Argentine artist in a singular lineage, that of the “bedridden”, in which he also includes his own father, the Marquis de Sade and the mythical director of Playboy, Hugh Hefner. Preciado thus identifies a productive model for art. Not that of the Factory, with its Fordist reminiscences; nor that of the stain-covered workshop, nor that of the studio, which aspires to a Zen sublimation of the office. This mode of production has its center in the bed, and in Hefner its postcard for the masses.

It is known: Lamborghini spent the last years of his life in bed, reading, writing and elaborating what we understand today as his plastic work, which includes unclassifiable fabrications such as the Proletarian Chamber Theater and the pieces on display in this exhibition. But if the Lamborghinian mode of production shares with that of his colleagues the confinement to bed and the blurring of the boundaries between work and rest, it differs from them, and this is the crux of the matter, because it takes to its extreme the cancellation of the opposition between consumption and production that pornography holds as a promise.

I explain in two steps.

First. Sade was a writer who, like almost everyone, when he was in bed, indulged in his reveries, some of them subversive and transgressive, and then put them on paper. Hefner is his update for the mass age: the bed is now the command center from which, thanks to the development of technology, he can transmute his fantasies into the pastiche of texts and photographic images typical of the porn magazine in its imperial stage. Osvaldo Lamborghini is, above all, and unlike his precursors, a subject of consumption: consumption of texts that have one of their origins in Sade and in the images serialized by Hefner. But he is a consumer who makes visible, and underlines, the moment in which the process of consumption concretizes its potential as a process of production.

Second. In an essay by now classic, precipitated by what in the 80s became known as the Sex Wars of feminism, film critic Linda Williams puts on her dominatrix costume and launches a mot d’ordre: body genres. The genres of the body – in cinema, but also in the arts – are those that exhibit the body in a state of ecstasy, as if it came out of itself, in a trance, in the process of becoming. Porn is one of them, of course. The others: horror and melodrama. In this most evil trinity the body occupies the center of the screen when it screams in horror, when it cries in grief or when it writhes in pleasure, but the most interesting thing, and this is Williams’ great contribution, is that its disturbing presence provokes extreme mimetic responses in the viewer’s body, which, when the planets align, replicates what happens on the screen; that is, it cries, in the case of melodrama, screams, in the case of horror, and finishes, in the case of a good porn. It is no coincidence that Lamborghini’s works displayed in these theaters highlight on more than one occasion the word END.

A provisional end. Against the warnings of Christian morality, what these works show is that in porn nothing ever ends. Au contraire, ending seems to be a way of beginning. We are before a genre, or before three genres, in which the primary organic reaction is a principle of production. And these works confirm this in a literal way: using as support loose pages from the pornographic imagination of his time, the works are produced as a result of the non-fortuitous encounter between the photos and the serialized words and the more or less glasé, more or less punk gloss that Lamborghini operates using bodily fluids, tempera, pens and pencils. Let’s underline: the pieces are literally made on pages of pornographic magazines and books of different order, as if they were the result of an uncontrollable hot flush, as if they were not the product of intellectual refinement but of certain organic reflexes. Lamborghini seems to be telling us: “Careful, enlightened gentlemen. Well-read, well-educated, correct, impeccable gentlemen. Never forget that this is one of the ways of making art: to react, affirmatively or critically, to what others have produced before us”. Art not as creation ex nihilo, as procreation, but as gloss, as commentary, as quotation, as recontextualization; in short, as straw.

Let us take the signifier and the signified, as Osvaldo, the boy cup, would like to do, and let us return to the question of artistic production. As we know, and in spite of the valorization that certain pieces and certain names acquire in the expanded circulation of capital, for ordinary mortals, to whom we are sold the opium of Protestant morality, the idea of artistic production is precisely that of the unproductive, the sterile, the unfertile, the famous “mental straw”, which has always been thought of as waste, as excess, as milk spilled in vain. Lamborghini joyfully confronts this affront and transforms it into a productive principle. Thus, “the straw” produces, contrary to what religions tell us, a layer of meaning. In the form of assaulted figures, but also varnished, pearled, haloed, with flows of no doubtful origin, but also with tempera, oils, crayons, markers and pencils, materials from the outside world that the diligent Hanna sends him. What Lamborghini does, finally, is to show that this masturbatory relationship, of consumption and of “mere” adornment of consumption, of glossing and glazing of what has been consumed, is one of the ways in which art is produced in the 20th century; perhaps since always. END.