Lovesexy
Well, at least there’s good sex–the solution of another English novelist, D.H. Lawrence, for the individual’s isolation and society’s incoherence in a mechanized world. Two people who fuck purely, merging the personal and political in seamless pleasure, can start a revolution. Unfortunately, if the dispiriting little show “Lovesexy” at the Museum of Contemporary Art is any indication, the majority of artists and curators today view the erotic less as a trope for transformation than for simpleminded transgression. Far from connecting–with sexuality’s powerful depths, with audiences eager for understanding–these artists are “creating” from a solitary mire, and the curators defiantly rub the results in the faces of a numbed postmodern public.
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Billed as a meditation on “identity and desire” and installed in a cul-de-sac on the MCA’s third floor, these 12 works in various media often go out of their way to repulse. Turn left into the gallery and you’re greeted by Rebekah Levine’s Pssy Fever 2000 (the coy asterisk’s not mine); turn right and you’re drawn like a fly to sht by Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Pervert (1993). Both are chromogenic prints, i.e., full-color glossy photos. Levine’s shows the truncated torso of a young woman in a miniskirt, captured parting her legs to cross them; Opie’s features the photographer, naked, seated before a sumptuous gold-and-black cloth with her head bondage-hooded, her arms pierced at regular intervals with needles (46 to be exact), and the word “Pervert” carved with calligraphic flourish into her chest. According to the wall text, Self-Portrait/Pervert “confronts society’s negative perception of homosexuality.” It confronts society, all right, but with no certain purpose other than to shock. Positing that their viewers are “feverishly” male and full-of-hate straight, Levine and Opie then try to suggest our complicity in voyeurism and violence. But in the end we learn more about their own aggressive, enforcing desires.
First the partial success: the single best of 12 twisted vignettes in the 1995 parodic video Fresh Acconci, by bad-boy sensationalists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. They used porn actors and settings to re-create scenes from several experimental films Vito Acconci made in the 70s, essentially making porn films out of art films. (More recycling, but fortunately you can watch one of Acconci’s originals, the uncanny Claim Excerpts, by going up one floor.) In this segment a panting woman writhes atop a struggling man, clutching at his eyes: it seems she gets off by spreading the lids extrawide. Sufficiently pleasured, she rolls off him in a unique version of what Blake called “the lineaments of gratified desire,” only to start back at it within moments. This is ontological slapstick of a high order, as if Beckett had made fuck films, its self-referential wit central to a fascinating anatomy of bedroom politics and preferences and of the often repulsive nature of contemporary art. The other sequences in Fresh Acconci are just one-liners, however; in fact the work as a whole left me wondering just how interesting send-ups of pornography’s cliches–the sterile rooms and “romantic” lighting, the ludicrous situations and howlingly bad line readings–could ever be. I also wondered what schoolkids on field trips thought about the X-rated video showing in the Dr. Paul and Dorie Sternberg Family Video Gallery.
