Mr. Jha, who is in his mid-30's, has produced a spare, mysterious and somber tale of erotic violence and illicit love that stays in the mind long after the last page has been turned.
Mr. Nitsch, 68, a performance artist, was a founder of the now legendary Orgy Mystery Theater, a group of Viennese artists who explored themes of erotic violence in ritualistic performances staged around the world from the early 1960's to the late 1990's.
IAPS includes 823 standardized, emotionally evocative, internationally accessible, color photographs spanning nine general categories: animal, facial, mutilation, erotic, landscape, violence, objects, sport and pollution [ 10].
The fashion-ad poses register first, and then the details of clothing, much of it semitransparent, revealing breasts and genitals and suggesting an erotics of violence.
But by massaging the erotic springs of violence so vital to war, and stripping away all norms of decency, Kipling illuminates the depths of our darkest fantasies of revenge.
That anachronism is belied by these two exhibitions, charged with whipsaw violence and erotic play.
Accumulating know-how and equipment (including an anti-tank cannon), the four men live in a simulacrum of domesticity that seethes with ambient violence and erotic tension.
Blood Relations is a bronze tank engraved with extracts from a Salman Rushdie story that broods about the erotic heat and raging violence of the Arabian Nights.
Reggie Nadelson takes the political pulse of Harlem after Barack Obama's election, in BLOOD COUNT (Walker, $26), while in BODY WORK (Putnam, $26.95), Sara Paretsky throws fresh fuel on the smoldering issue of whether provocatively erotic art leads to violence against women.
Her essential cynicism, misanthropy, her attraction to erotic perversion, mania and violence is dressed in deliberately banal detail: she creates a powerful sense of menace as she delicately exposes the teeming horrors of the human psyche beneath the humdrum.
Indeed, because of the fallout from a 1965 exhibition called "Sex and Violence, Or Erotic and Patriotic Prints," Mr. Kent lost his job as curator at the John Slade Ely House in New Haven.
