Art Rookie: Sense and Sensuality, Legitimising Erotica in Art
I've spent the last few months thinking deeply about pleasure and love. I've discovered it can't be avoided, especially when you live in a flat with 20-somethings deeply concerned about the human condition, love, and bell hooks. It also can't be avoided when you've spent a whole term at university pouring over the work of feminist and queer artists that have managed to capture vulnerability, excitement and the political possibilities of the erotic in their medium of choice.
In October of 2022, I saw the Carolee Schneemann retrospective at the Barbican titled Body Politics, which introduced me to an artist whose visual and performance work pre-empted new ways of thinking about equity in sexual relations, centring herself as the subject, not the object of the male gaze. A couple of weeks later, I shed a few tears at a Julia Jacklin gig when she belted out the lyrics to "Ignore Tenderness". A powerful song that contemplates how difficult our pursuit of pleasure can be in a world that dictates what sex and intimacy should look like. More recently, I had the privilege of watching Laura Poitras's documentary All The Beauty and The Bloodshed, which followed Nan Goldin's artistic pursuits alongside her takedown of the Sacklers who are responsible for the opioid crisis. The slideshows of her photography from the 1970s and 1980s, especially those that were part of her series The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, were pregnant with emotion and a sort of communal intimacy which feels defunct now.
These cultural experiences - alongside rewatches of Sex and The City - are my salves for the anxieties and overwhelming ennui that roll around every so often, only exacerbated by individualism. Instead of turning cynical, however, this quest for understanding desire and intimacy in a modality that skewers hegemonic sexual ideologies is proactive. It can disrupt the ways we are conditioned to see. From depictions of the female nude in European oil paintings that - according to critic John Berger - confirmed the object status of women, to problematic gendered representations of sexuality - partially built and sustained by pornography - our visual vocabulary is littered with images that uphold patriarchal conventions of desire and womanhood.
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Amia Srinivasan further supports this claim in her book, The Right To Sex. In a chapter on pornography, Srinivasan elaborates how in heterosexual depictions of sex, the camera replicates the man's point of view, rarely showing his face. When the male body is pictured, it is seen as "the agent of the film's action and the source of its desire" - reinforcing Laura Mulvey's theory of the gaze, which posits that the woman in the frame is an object subjected to a controlling voyeuristic, male gaze.
According to Mulvey's influential essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, the gaze functions as a form of mastery that projects onto the camera, resulting in the cinematic male gaze that performs violence on the on-screen woman. Looking at pornography and other depictions of heterosexuality in this scope, the woman on screen is conceptualised as an erotic object for both the male body they interact with and the spectator gaining scopic pleasure from said interaction. These representations establish the codes of sex and pleasure safely within the constraints of male desire, dictating how sexuality should be expressed and experienced. It can also dictate who should be seen as a desirable sexual being which, more often than not, upholds western beauty standards. Long story short, it puts a strain on the possibilities of sexual expression and desire.
When confronted by these limitations, it is easy to condemn erotica entirely and pigeonhole images of intimacy into those that purely titillate.
Carolee Schneemann dedicated much of her early practice to defying how sexuality and eroticism were defined in America under patriarchy. As Elise Archias, author of The Concrete Body states, by prioritising the "everyday materiality of bodies", Schneemann's art allows her audience to reframe sex and consider the normalcy of erotic pleasure.
These vivid thoughts regarding the body were drawn out when Schneemann joined the Judson Dance Theatre. The Judson Group was a collective of dancers and artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Robert Dunn that explored new forms of choreography through workshops and dance performances in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village. Prompted by performances such as the Newspaper Event (1963) and Chromelodeon (1963) that emphasised the expressiveness of everyday actions, Schneemann began to develop a keen understanding of the expansive possibilities of bodies in interaction. This preoccupation was explored in Rebecca Schneider's collection of essays on postmodern feminist practitioners titled The Explicit Body in Performance. According to Schneider, Schneemann began to view the body as a visual territory that was both a "personal-particular environment" and a" social environment" constructed through culturally sanctioned representations of gender.
When Schneemann began stepping into her work, starting with Eye Body (1962), she became an 'active object' that challenged the object status relegated to images of female bodies. In The Obscene Body/Politic, Schneemann reveals that her desire to create erotic imagery in Eye Body, Meat Joy and Fuses is a reaction to repressive depictions of female pleasure. Schneemann, instead, wanted to see what lived sexuality could look like in her vision. In this way, her work foregrounded the guiding principle of the women's liberation movement: "The personal is political".
“These potent depictions of intimacy and the artists that make them are inspirational; they effectively sever how we are conditioned to view desire and eroticism.”
Schneemann's art became a way to "de-materialise the frame, the object, the aesthetic commodity". Her erotic film Fuses, made between 1964 and 1967, captured Schneemann and her partner James Tenney having sex over a year was incredibly transformative in understanding the expansive possibilities of the moving image. Fuses overflows with pleasure; it seeps out of the screen. These explicit depictions of sexual imagery on film stock were then fragmented, spliced together, and dipped in dye, offering viewers a dynamic montage of colours, textures, flesh, and fluids. On a narrative level, the sexual imagery is fragmented to avoid reproducing sexual depictions that prioritise the male orgasm. This further separates Fuses from mainstream pornography that classifies the male orgasm (aptly called the money shot) as the ceremonious end to sex. These seemingly small gestures can begin to shatter how we see sexuality and pornography.
While being more outwardly explicit, Nan Goldin's photographs share a similar narrative. Her intimate portrayals of life in the 1980s in New York at the height of the AIDS crisis severed the separation between photographer and subject. Goldin was not a wallflower taking photographs in silence. She was in all shapes and forms (and sometimes for better or for worse) a participant in the world she was documenting. In an essay for the New Humanist, Huw Lemmey shares what makes Goldin's work so arresting, "She managed to capture the strange combination of excitement and risk alongside the poverty and drug addiction of downtown Manhattan. Goldin did so with a sleight of hand that gave the images emotional potency while conferring on the subjects a respect and dignity that most contemporary representations of the scene denied them."
These potent depictions of intimacy and the artists that make them are inspirational; they effectively sever how we are conditioned to view desire and eroticism. It would be trite to suggest going to galleries and looking at avant-garde portrayals of sexuality can undo years of patriarchal brainwashing. Still, for me, it's a start and showcases the possibilities for developing an erotic politic that subverts male, western thought.
Words: Zara Aftab
