Seeking The Erotic At Spring Break Art Show
I went to the Spring Break Art Show looking for erotic art and what I found was…a lot less obvious. But if you are looking for it, you will find it.
Housed in the old CBS Broadcasting building, an artist, pair, or collective took over former offices of Anderson Cooper etc. to exhibit their work. Each booth feels like a little world, painted, decorated, nurtured by the artist(s). I sashayed through the labyrinth, peeking in each office seeking skin, nipples, and sex.
How do you define the erotic? I was asked. Anything and everything is erotic, if you choose it to be. All art is inherently erotic, as it is the expression of our creative life force. Connecting to feelings, pleasure, and joy is erotic.
I perceived this as a text between lovers— “U up?” vibes, but in fact, it was artist Nadia Ahmed’s missed connection texts with her mother. Because of barriers both generational, cultural, and language, there is a seeking and misunderstanding between the two of them that is oh so familiar to those of us who have had text-based situationships.
Artist Pam Korman’s room beckoned me (I am tragically susceptible to red lips.) In her work, Beyond Lip Service, mirroring becomes an act of investigation, searching for the self in the reflection of another. And isn’t that what we all do with our lovers?
The artist has filled the room with photos and videos of a grandmother, mother, and daughter, to show the matrilineal impact and exhibit the similarities inherited by each woman, all creating the same facial expressions and wearing the same shade of lipstick. It felt heavy in the expectations of femininity that are inherently modeled and played at from a young age.
A room in which The US Federal Government’s Growing Banned Words List was printed, displayed, and blown up for emphasis. Most of you have seen this already, but standing in a room surrounded by these words made it hit harder. Sex & censorship is unfortunately my bread & butter.
I was warmly received in “House Arrest,” artist Alice Herbert’s examination of her 24 hours spent with an ankle monitor strap-on. Her curatorial statement, by Clio Herbert, says it best:
“HOUSE ARREST comprises seven self-portraits, juxtaposed with two distinctively redacted versions of Herbert’s arrest record. The photographs, alluring and evocative, call to us like a siren, destined to sing men to their deaths. They pull the viewer in with their nakedness and vulnerability, challenging us to question what we are witnessing. The play between the female figure and the ankle monitor, an angular, automated, and mechanical device so at odds with the supple flesh of the body, accentuates the tension between women’s bodies and suppressive bureaucratic systems. The device binds the wearer to her home-transforming the private, domestic interior into a public arena-and places it under government surveillance.”
Friends, Alice and I LAFFED about the men who viewed this work and proceeded to hit on her. We also laughed at “bureaucratic BDSM”—see below:
“The voyeuristic qualities of the photographs, which peer into moments of defenselessness and intimacy present in both the figure’s exposed body and in her circumstances, mirror the panoptic realities of the judicial system. The arrest reports, exhibited alongside the portraits, reinforce assertions of bodily autonomy, acting as an underpainting of bureaucratic BDSM; the redacted forms function as a palimpsest, revealing different narratives at play. Considered together, these elements establish a visual parallel between Herbert’s experience of arrest, both physical and psychological, and the broader societal domination of the female body. Thus positing HOUSE ARREST as an allegory for women’s experience.”
Male Preserve by Pennie Key is a study on the intimacy men allow in sport that they would never be okay with outside of it. “The series examines masculinity: how men hold each other, fight each other, and how the gym accommodates alpha maleness and even homophobia alongside gestures that are plainly camp and homoerotic.
The sport and the fetish run on parallel refusals. Fetish takes the sport’s holds and postures and discards the skill underneath. The athlete performs something plainly erotic and disregards it.”
Truly amazing.
The artist Melissa Messer paints her friends in strikingly vivid color, landscape-like nudes. I have been deep in thinking about the female gaze, and I think her work truly captures it: movement, strength, power. When asked if her work was erotic she described an intimacy, a vulnerability, shared life and time with other women.
To me, it looked like freedom.
You can visit Spring Break Art Show through September 28th. Tickets here.