My Perversion is the Belief in True Love (English, German, Paperback, Illustrated Ed)

The New York artist Ellen Cantor uses stereotypical images of beauty and violence, as transmitted by the media, along with personal images. In her work she enters the world of carefully cultivated regulations, requirements and prohibitions, and with narrative videos and photomontages, severely disturbs our pre-conditioned conception of oppositions between good and bad, sex and love, art and trash. In her videos, Cantor juxtaposes shots of sex and violence as a means to integrate the obscenity of realism, and to fill in the ellipses created in commercial film. She utilizes videotape re-dubbing as a means for artistic creation, and by negotiating between the private experience of creating videotapes and presenting those works in a public forum, Cantor initiates an open sexual dialogue with the viewer. Her videotapes are an exploration of the boundaries between the imagined and the real; between the erotic and the pornographic; between the symbolic and the actual; between the public and the private -- all of which are central to the debate concerning the exhibition of nudity and sexuality within the art world.