After a don't-worry-this-isn't-an-orgy tour by a woman whose melonious breasts were not concealed by the sheer fabric she had tied together in the name of shirthood, I was loosed upon the fourth annual Seattle Erotic Art Festival at Consolidated Works. Landing straightaway at a large ceramic fortune cookie shaped as a shaved vagina while overhearing an escalating argument between a couple about her failure to have orgasms and his lack of sympathy was, in fact, a bit much, especially when the argument turned out to be a performance that culminated in the man being escorted to a stage in the middle of the room by a band of underdressed floozies who held him down and tore off his clothes. As much as I support the message of the sex-positive community, at heart I am an appreciator of a little old-fashioned repression, which I believe makes me a sex-negative.
Whether I am qualified to review John John Jesse's frothy pink painting of a woman in a bunny mask snorting cocaine off the vagina of another, bored-looking woman, well, I suppose that is the question. I felt sure that the man standing in the corner near the painting, wearing something between a sumo diaper and Speedo held up by a leather harness and watching me scribble in my notebook, knew just by looking that no one had snorted coke off my business, and that I had a questionable understanding of the representation's relationship to its subject matter. I retreated to the unisex bathrooms, where a plump gentleman at the sinks flirted with and surveyed the miniskirt and knee socks of a woman he called Bliss.
It's not that all the art was bad, just that most of it was secondary to somebody's idea of erotic: saliva, stilettos, vice grips on nipples. One photograph of a penis and a smoky-looking emission had a note scrawled on its wall label: "Shot underwater—not smoke!" There were a few delightful contributions by Seattle artists. Toi Sennhauser, Steven Edward Miller, Walt Jones, and John Jacobs offered a raspberry-sauce-licking machine, a landscape of queer bunnies, photographic portraits of naked women unnoticed in public places (the 76 station at 15th Avenue West; the Central Library, eighth floor), and burlesque performers acting out the Self-Peeling Shrimp with Lemon striptease, respectively. Kevin D. Boze and Stasia Kato undertook a charged social experiment, recording on-site testimonies and turning them into biographical comics about the sitters' first sexual experiences. Yet the good stuff could not make up for a pencil drawing of a scrotum with nipples titled Balzac, the writhing and chirping of two trash-loving dancers dressed as dirty birds in geisha lipstick, a poet yelling for a nastier lover, and the faked orgasms of performers wearing gold and electric-blue lamé.
When an organizer heard about the orgasm scene, which evidently was unplanned, she praised the performers for their initiative taking. Then she asked them, "Did you come together?"
