Sticky Flowers

Flowers have always been an all-time favorite motif for painters and photographers. For centuries, artists with all their talent and refinement have tried to capture the beauty and transience of flowers. And hardly anything else is as strongly charged with symbolism and meaning as flowers.

Often it can be said by solely the type of photographic representation whether a woman or a man captured an image. Female is poetic-romantic and male is sober-puristic? There are no clichés, only exceptions that confirm the rule.

So, needless to say that my work is influenced by the great photographers who have dedicated themselves intensively to flowers as a motif, above all, of course, Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe, who have shaped our view on flowers for good. But also pictures of younger, less well-known artists influenced my point of view: The beautiful, picturesque flower “portraits” by Anna Leroy from Paris, the radical sexuality of the photographs by Florian Hetz from Berlin and the fascinating series “Baroque Ikebana” by the Swedish visual artist Nicklas Hultman, which is full of hints and symbols.

The Language of Flowers:
Medieval Spirituality, Victorian Oaths of Love, Japanese Codes

From love to narcissism to purity – flowers have been given certain meanings for centuries: in the western world as well as in Japan. It was always about expressing very specific feelings, assigning virtues and exchanging secret messages.

In the world of European Middle Ages, strongly influenced by repressive Catholicism, flowers were primarily symbols for religious motifs such as virgin purity (white lily), virtue (white rose), martyrdom (red rose) and sin (thistle). But flowers also served as means of communication in the Islamic world: the ladies of a harem used certain types of flowers and the meanings assigned to them to communicate with the outside world.

Out of that the Selamlik developed in the 18th century, a flower language popular in the Victorian period throughout Europe. Above all, love messages were transmitted with this language, but numerous other, rather unambiguous messages could also be sent to somebody’s beloved. With irises one said “I am always with you” and with chrysanthemums “My heart is free”, whereas dahlias said “I am already taken”. Hydrangeas meant “you think too much of yourself”, a columbine “you are a weakling”, asters “you are not faithful to me” and yellow carnations even “I despise you”.

A kind of “language of flowers” also developed in Asia. It is still an important part of Japanese culture today, because flowers are traditionally given away to both women and men.
In Ikebana, the Japanese art of arranging flowers, the meaning of each individual flower also plays a special role, because in his respective arrangement the designer should express his feeling whilst creating as well as his relationship with nature.
Hanakotoba is an ancient Japanese form of floral language in which certain complex codes and emotions were conveyed by flowers and plants. In this way, communicating directly with the recipient or viewer was possible without using words. For example, the amaryllis stands for shyness, the cactus flower for lust and sex, the peony for bravery and the yellow tulip for one-sided love. Even though Hanakotoba has lost popularity today, this “language” is still spoken in anime and manga and finds its expression in art and subculture.

The Most Beautiful Sexual Organs in the World

We tend to overlook the fact that flowers are one thing above all: the plant’s reproduction tools. Inconspicuous or eye-catching, tiny, or spectacularly opulent – nature has developed countless variations in color, shape, fragrance and function to draw the attention of pollinators to themselves.

Almost without exception, flowers stand for the female gender, for the delicate, the tempting, the receiving. Fruit, on the other hand, is often assigned to the male. Hard, urgent, phallic, and full of seeds just waiting to fall on fertile soil and to reproduce.

The “virgin-innocent” blossom seduces to sin. Not least because “forbidden fruit” or “fruits of evil” grow from it. This is what Jewish-Christian-Islamic moral theology teaches us. Nevertheless: Humans are part of nature and, as such, not least connected to it by the sexual act.

Do Flowers Know Feelings of Pleasure?

For centuries, the major, monotheistic world religions have persuaded us that the sexual act only has to serve reproduction and that all pleasure in it is sinful and reprehensible. Unlike animal or human sexual organs, which seem almost unimaginative and banal in comparison, the flowers and blossoms rarely have a “sexual” effect on us humans – quite the contrary. Even the most stubborn Puritans can indulge themselves completely “innocently” in the beauty of flowers without having a sinful feeling or having to go to confession.

And yet, the artist’s imagination has always found ways to erotically interpret flowers (and fruits) and to charge them with sexual symbolism. Often the visual similarity may be so strong that it almost becomes obvious. But the interpretation is not always that clear.

In German, “in the bloom of someone’s years”, is used for “prime of life” and “wilting away” means “pining away”. If you watch film sequences of the Japanese floristry-superstar Azuma Makoto, you cannot avoid noticing the parallels between the life cycle of flowers and human sexuality. In his time-lapse recordings, flowers and plants bloom and “become erect”, squirm, swell – to slacken, wilt and collapse seconds later. It is probably no coincidence that physicality, sexuality and lust play a much more central and by no means negative role in Japanese culture.

So why does it feel a bit like breaking a taboo to “dust” a flower with human sperm? The male orgasm is often surrounded by something like an aura of brutality: The penis as a weapon with which the sexual partner is penetrated and often subjected at the same time. The ejaculate that is used to “fertilize”, but which is also an obvious symbol of potency and dominance. Most men are fascinated by sperm: the amount, the appearance, the quality. There is hardly any porn where the moment of the eruption is not the climax in the truest sense of the word – shown and glorified in several camera perspectives. A man impresses, rewards, humiliates, delights and marks with his cum.

Maybe that explains the fascination that my series Sticky Flowers triggers in the viewer ...