This blog is written from a video interview with Samuel Bester, the artist behind the cover of the first SRHM Special Collection on Sexual Pleasure, which will be available online in September 2024.

SRHM Chief Executive, Eszter Kismodi, spoke to Marseille-based video artist Samuel Bester, about his work, his art and it’s connection to sexuality and sexual pleasure.

Samuel, could you tell us a couple of words about yourself?

My name is Samuel Bester. I was always fascinated by art, by the inexpressible and the irrational and I was always interested in emotion, creativeness and upheavals it can create in us. I was always brought to art exhibitions by my parents. So, whether it’s drawing, photography, poetry, or moving images, I tried since I was very young to find out, to understand, and to practice art.

First, with a pen, with drawing. And then I discovered video art when I was studying in Strasbourg with my teacher, in ‘92. And this is where I discovered video art. Video art is an art practice, born in 63, thanks to Nam June Paik and is a heritage of the Fluxus movement, and Fluxus movement is an art movement which strives not to separate art from life. This is my philosophy, to have life and art really bound together. So, this is how I discovered that video art mixes lots of things I was really interested in, image and sound of course, sound that speaks a lot to the heart and to the body. And time. This is something that you don’t have in lots of different kinds of art, but time is also something very important. And for me, in time and in sound, there is something very special, and this is what we can read in The Little Prince. When the fox says ‘you can only see well, with your heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye’. And this is something very important to me and in my work that art can reveal things that we don’t see, or we wouldn’t have seen. Sometimes it’s here but we don’t have the gaze to see it.

So, this is my background. When I studied art, I also worked with sound that we can call acousmatic music’ but there’s another word we can call it, ‘electro acoustic music’ or ‘musique concrète’. It was invented by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer in the 40s. And what is interesting in acousmatic music, it is a very interesting word because it comes from Ancient Greek theatre. It was a way of playing on stage. The musicians were hidden behind a curtain and so the audience couldn’t see the musicians. The idea is to detach the object that makes the sound from the sound we hear. So, we get closer to the pure meaning of the sound. This is what is very interesting in acousmatic music, and this is also what I experiment with in my work sometimes. I make videos but also sound. So, this is for me very important. Robert Filliou gave a definition of art which I find very nice which is that “art is what makes life more interesting than art”.  And for me, this is something that I do in my work.

The image that we are using comes from video artwork of yours. Can you tell us a little bit more about the image?

Yes, this image is taken from a video work called Hermaphrodite. And this is one of the eight works I did based on the Marie Cosnay translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. It’s a poem that is now more than 2000 years old. And there are lots of very fascinating stories in this Metamorphosis book. I did eight works based on different stories and two of them have images. This Hermaphrodite, and the other one that I did recently called Narcissus . I discovered in this new translation, it’s from 2017, there’s an incredible modernity in the text that resonates in many ways, today. There are lots of evocations of love, harassment, eroticism and pleasure, many feelings expressed with an incredible force in this in this book, in this poem. This is a huge poem, maybe 120 different stories. So, this is where the image comes from, this Hermaphrodite.

In this text, what I found very interesting is that it leaves plenty of room for the reader to imagine and build his own imaginary world. This is very important. This is what I try to do in my work. It evokes the fusion of two genders, male and female, and they end up coming together in a new genre. So, there’s a beautiful sensuality even though, of the two characters, one wants to be in love with the other doesn’t. One doesn’t really agree but, like in many of these Metamorphosis stories, the Gods are not very kind with humans, and they accept the request of Salmacis, who is asking to be bound forever with this boy, Hermaphrodite. They accept, so they get bound together and there are both sexes together.

So, the image comes from this video. This is one of the images of the of the film, that is 10 minutes long. This video is almost the entire story. I have characters who speak or read the text because the text really has very interesting music in the words. This is where the image comes from that you chose.

The journal issue will have several articles, research articles, review articles, commentaries, discussions, about sexual pleasure. As you mentioned, it’s about how to enjoy sexual life – pleasure without violence, but also dealing with sexual pleasure itself. How is your artwork connected to pleasure and sexual pleasure?

This is quite new for me, but I had a Christian upbringing and was born in Switzerland. And pleasure wasn’t really something we talked about in my own childhood. Erotism, pleasure and pornography were designated as something bad. So, it was something I didn’t grow up with.

But very soon, very early, I don’t remember the age, but I was quite small, maybe nine or 10, I discovered, in the library of my parents, a bit hidden, the very beautiful book of Helmut Newton called ‘Sleepless Night’,  with his photographs. This was new to me, it gave me a kind of strange pleasure because it was, in my mind, something that was forbidden. And it telescoped to a priori opposed feelings:  something that is forbidden, and something that gives me pleasure.

This was a very important moment in my life, when I understood there was a third element that came out from the binary of good and evil, there was something in between, and this was something for me that we can call ‘the perhaps’. It’s between good and bad or evil. And there’s something in between. This is what I learned when I was small. It’s like quantum entanglement, something very fascinating. It means you have elements that can have two situations at the same time. So, you can be here and there at the same time. This was a very important discovery. So, you can be in two states simultaneously. And this is something that was very important to me.

I started to work with pleasure in a video I did in 2017 called ‘The dream of the girl diver’. I was inspired by a wood print of Hokusai from 1814. It shows two octopuses undertaking a woman that is lying under water. I had this text translated and I was really expecting that we would listen to a nice tale because the artists had been inspired by a tale about a princess, something very classical. And I was really surprised to hear the translation because it was deeply sexual and pleasure oriented. This was a story which was sometimes very rude. I took this text which was written on the image of the Hokusai print as the story of my video. So, this was also a great discovery.

This film was a kind of trigger because I was surprised to see this very erotic text in this old painting or representation. When I presented this film, it was a small success. I showed it in many video art festivals. And I discovered that many people were enthusiastic, and they were pleasantly surprised. I realized that it was very important for lots of people. This is something we don’t discuss a lot in our lives and in our society, pleasure is something that we don’t talk much about. And then I see all these images, on social networks on Instagram, for example, censored, and sometimes old paintings from the 19th century are censored. This is something I found revolting, to see the prudishness that has now developed in social networking. Because at the beginning, the internet brought with it a promise of freedom, of non-censorship, and now we are in a kind of morality again. And this has been brought to us by the large capitalist group that decided that this is something you can’t show, or you can’t evoke. It’s a kind of new morality. Before it was religion that gave us morality and now, I think that we have a new kind of morality. And that’s a shame. And that’s why I try, in my work, in my own small way, with video, to do what I can do. I think I became a pleasure activist.

As you know, the journal produces knowledge that we use for influence and evidence to change laws, policies, advocacy, influence service delivery, in relation to sexual health. It is very relevant that you said in the past, but today as well, depending on which part of the world you are, religion, society, culture, politics is censoring and attacking the fulfillment, respect and protection of sexual health and rights. So, how would you like to see the impact or influence of your work? How would you like to see your artwork resonate in relation to sexual pleasure?

I like to say that ‘when you want to change direction, you first have to slow down’. For me, this is something important. When you have a speeding train, it needs to break to avoid derailing on a bend. So, it is very important to slow down. In the way we deal with technology and other things, we are always encouraged to go faster and faster. So, this is, for me, the first thing to do. And as you say, to change things is important but to change things you must first slow down and take time for reflection.

And this is why in my work, and personally, I was surprised to look at old texts. I was really surprised, like I said, about the Hokusai 1814, but much before. We found text from 3000 year before Christ where the Sumerians wrote very erotic text and amazing text about pleasure, about how the Gods made love, about how you can have pleasure and can procreate, it’s amazing. So, for me, taking this slow down movement is about reading ancient texts and ancient philosophy, like poetry. Also, Ovid wrote a very nice book called “The Art of Love”. And the situation we have is not an evolution that goes, for me, in a good direction, because we have lots of censorship and lots of morality that comes out that is quite new, it didn’t happen in ancient times. The texts weren’t hidden, or they weren’t shameful texts. So, talking about pleasure is also what I try to do in my work, to talk about eroticism or pleasure. I try not to talk in the medium where it’s obvious to talk about pleasure or erotism for example, in pornography film photography or erotic film industry, because you preach to the converted. So, my work, in video art or film or audio, is shown to a much larger audience and with small evocations I can bring images and feelings to the audience.

I will always remember I did a screening of this film about Hokusai and after the screening, I had three elderly women who called me out after the screening to thank me for showing the clitoris as I showed it in my film. And this will really stay with me. It was amazing to have this discussion after the screening. If I can quote Epicurus, he said that “learning and pleasure go hand in hand”. I like this idea that we must accept it, talk about it and feel it because like I said, social media tries to make pleasure something bad or hidden or something you must keep to yourself, and this is not true. It’s not true for me. You have lots of very nice texts, old texts and poetry that make you feel alive.

Desire is something everybody has, and pleasure is something everybody has and why not speak about it? And so, if I can, I try to provoke pleasure within my videos and to activate pleasant excitement and to mix the excitement, physical excitement, but also intellectual awareness. So, what I try to do with my work is to get out the pleasure out of the ghetto where it is now.

Find out more about Samuel Bester and his work at www.samuelbester.com