The Strips

Long ago, I was a girl who was interested in bawdy images and freedom to express my curiosity about taboo words, pictures and other forms of expression.  I didn’t really want to do the things that I was interested in studying, but I quickly found out that taboo subjects and punishment for investigating them go together hand in hand.  I faced negative societal judgement for thought crimes not sins of action.  There was much more structure in place to keep society imprurient  than there is now, or rather, the focus today has shifted away from sexual and expressive freedom to other taboos.    I found out that there were costs to pay if you wanted to fight for freedom in ways that weren’t popular.  I got scared that I would never have a future, so I took the name Queen Zealot Blaze, or  Q.Z. Blaze,  to try to keep my life safe, while I fought like a mama zealot, torch in hand, to set fire to the foundation of lies that was erected to keep me quiet and subdued.

Why was I not allowed to portray, on stage, my first, terrible sexual experience in all its horrible clarity?  Why was it improper to act out what had been done in reality?  Why was I pushed to erase the picture I drew of an erect penis being shoved towards my face, an image I was trying to deal with, having had the experience in real life?  Why was I told it was unladylike to express my anger and confusion  in words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’?  I became a fighter for free expression, right about the time that 2 Live Crew was being prosecuted,  Screw Magazine editor was put in prison, and postmasters from the United States Postal Service were hand delivering child pornography to the mail boxes of suspected pedophiles because it was illegal to send the stuff through the mail.  Somehow, the postmasters were allowed to possess printed material that would put others in prison the minute they touched it or took it into their houses, often innocently, with the bills and circulars that came in the mail.  By the way, more than one person was prosecuted for possessing printed material that they had not specifically requested.  Possession was the key.  That was all before the internet, of course.

I don’t think the reader here can imagine the backlash I received by asking why the law didn’t apply equally to all citizens.  I think this was when I started to think about how broken the legal system must be to allow for constitutional exceptions when distasteful subject matter was concerned.  I asked why we would even consider diluting the purity and clarity of the constitution, without amendment, because we didn’t like some “unsafe” or “unsavory” outcome.

I wrote a relatively well known 400 page poem called “Found Poetry……”. I also had my persona (and a poem of mine called “Revolution” and the various people who had reacted to its existence)  featured in an, as yet, unreleased full-length movie called “Ploything” (named after another of my poems)  and have started “QZ Gallery” to celebrate freedom of expression but, back then, I knew I had to work on improving my three dimensional composition for my sculptural and dramatic creations, so I used the girly magazines I had been studying for some clue into the nature of sexual attraction as two dimensional composition studies.  I thought that if I could classify all the imagery, that I might come to an understanding of composition and beauty.   I contacted Playboy Magazine to make sure that the paper collages I was about to create could legally be used in a book about photography of the female form.  They gave me the go ahead to make those derivative works and, seven years later, I had a book I called The Female Form Frozen on Film.  I got back in touch with the representatives of Playboy who had offices in Sears Tower and was told that the lawyers for Playboy had changed their thinking and that all derivative works were, at that time, disallowed.  Seven years I had spent on The Female Form Frozen and I was angry at their change of policy.  From that anger a new project, “Strips” was born.

Although “Strips” was a protest against current copyright law, which allowed Playboy to do what it had done to me, wasting seven years of my life on 600 works that would never be seen,  I also used “Strips” to examine other aspects of erotica and pornographic representation which had come to public attention from polarity between the Republicans who wanted to diminish the force of the first amendment to the Constitution and the Democrats who wanted to diminish the force of the second amendment.

I took pictures of the collages.  These pictures were taken by putting the collages flat on the front lawn.  Certainly, that part of the collages which only showed lawn and leaves on the edges of the pictures of the collages would not be illegal or subject to law suit.  I fell in love with Op Art when I was a child.  I suppose the “Strips”, rather than being op art, were more like slop art,  more like Agit-Slop and less like Agit-Prop.

Although, I didn’t keep track of the order in which these pieces were made, I’m calling this one “Strips 1”.

The process was to take pictures I’d had printed of the collages that were supposedly ‘copyright infringement’ and to cut that photographic paper into strips of color and images from the disassembling of the Female Form collages. I made strips of photographs from the pictures I’d taken of the collages.

I thought that it would be okay to take parts of the infringing materials and, as long as it didn’t look like the copyrighted work, maybe it would not be legally derivative.

As I was considering doing sketches of the pictures to create images that I drew myself, so that the information about how to pose would be kept viable, even though the pictures would not be seen, I saw that copyright infringement penalties had recently been assessed against a picture of a lady in a hat on a diving board over a pool.  The original was a different hat.  The color of the water of the pool was different.  There was no attempt to make anyone believe that the message, origin or image were the original.  There was no proof, as far as I remember, that the infringing image was based on the original, no proof that the photographer had seen and/or copied the original image.   It was crazy to me, like if someone had taken a picture of a square and claimed copyright to all squares.

Here is a picture of the sketch images I began and then decided against using.  (sketches)

Strips 2

The Images . 18 years or older only — adult content warning!!!