Someone--goading me on, I expect--asked me which work I liked least, and you know what? I couldn't answer. Among the different kinds of visual art, erotic art is one of the few that nakedly asks for a feeling--arousal--instead of engagement, whether philosophical or aesthetic. When political art asks for your outrage, you can shrug and dismiss it as propaganda. When erotic art asks for arousal and fails, it's that much more deflated and sad. You can take artists to task for failing to be rigorous in their thinking or execution. But you can hardly blame someone for a lukewarm fantasy life.
So, instead of further musing along these lines, I offer you the following list of things I liked:
1. Funny things. I liked Scott Kingham's photographs of doughnuts impaled on erect penises. I mean, who hasn't thought of it? But who's actually done it? The critic Arthur Danto once wrote of Robert Mapplethorpe's work that it causes the viewer to cross an unsettling line between fantasy and enactment; in this case, I happily crossed. I also quite liked Maggie Melvin's photographs of tree crotches. You could, if you were inclined to Earth Mother-ness, say that all nature is erotic, but I think these photographs are smart because they speak to our inclination to see smut everywhere.
This kind of understatement can be a relief when everything is so aboveboard and open, and much of what I saw at the show was earnest in the extreme. Erotic images still carry a sliver of political feeling, a kind of insistence on the visibility of marginalized things, and they are therefore treated with gravity. But it will be nice when all the margins are comfortable enough to be funny. Funny feels like taboo in an erotic art show; funny is therefore sexy.
2. Spoofs. Artist Axel's spoof on Gericault's overwrought and Romantic Raft of the Medusa--not, in this case, a bunch of starving cannibals crawling all over each other for the last crumbs of life, but a packed gay cruise on a nice day. Bodies lie inert: not dead, but postcoitally exhausted. A few energetic sorts wave bright towels at passing boats. The last word on what's necessary for survival.
3. Judicious placement. It was an excellent choice, placing Karen Leibowitz's The Giving of the Torah and the Binding of Eris right over the opening-night buffet. Her enormous, grand painting of a body hogtied on a table--one of the few works to take on religious themes--was given fresh meaning by spectators respectfully chomping spicy salami beneath it.
4. Ambivalence among the certain. A photograph by S.D. Holman of a woman, clothespins clipped to her pendulous breasts with mathematical precision, her hands bound, the lower half of her face covered in black leather. Over her mask, her expression looks both worried and adoring--submissive, I guess you would say--and lends tension to the image, a situation that is obviously consensual, but retaining the odd imbalance of power that keeps sex interesting.
This image stood out, again, by way of contrast--with the numerous works influenced very clearly by Mapplethorpe, with his stylish and rigorous formalism applied to sexually explicit themes (though none, I'm afraid, as stylish and rigorous as his). There were plenty of very sleek bondage shots, some specific fetishes documented with anthropological care. Holman's photograph undid much of the certainty of those images, and was therefore, to me, more interesting.
5. Things way outside my own experience. The enlargement of your own horizons is in some sense the point of such a show, although sometimes you feel there isn't anything new out there. Claire Johnson's paintings of women's bodies--many of them flabby, patently not perfect--covered in tiny razor-blade slits that trickle blood do seem new, even though I've seen them before. The combination of tenderness and cruelty is still shocking.
6. Tiny little vulva paintings. By Rebecca Luncan, on coins. What's not to love?
