In Terms Of

Tag: Pornography

  • Hot or Not

    “Aesthetics” of “Female” “Attractiveness”
    Friday, May 15, 2015
    Frieze Talks
    Frieze New York, Randall’s Island, New York

    “I sense some confusion,” observed Casey Jane Ellison, an artist and comedian who hosted a panel called “‘Aesthetics’ of ‘Female’ ‘Attractiveness’” at Frieze New York. Like a daytime talk-show host, she began with a monologue of observational humor—which included a fear of going bald and the dating scene for bulimics—but the audience didn’t laugh. Full of disconnects in timing, diction, and subject matter, her introduction desperately need an applause sign, if not a laugh track. Ellison placed the blame on us: “Art audiences are just kind of like—don’t touch me—you know what I mean?” No, I don’t. “It’s like, get involved,” she implored. “This is about all of us.” Ellison’s awkward monologue made me appreciate the jump-cut edits in her online television programs such as What the F*shion? The non sequiturs were making things slightly better: “Does the truth set you free? No, it will set you on fire.” And, closer to the panel’s topic: “We live in a postmodern world. Are we posthot?”

    Casey Jane Ellison speaks

    Ellison introduced the speakers one by one, as they took the stage: the artist, activist, and filmmaker Leilah Weinraub; the writer and activist Grace Dunham; the activist and writer Reina Gossett; and the blogger Karley Sciortino. The host’s first questions to them were “Are you feeling safe?” and “How fat do you feel today?” The speakers answered stiffly, probably feeling like the audience did during the monologue. Her next question was more promising: “What was the first object or product you bought that propagated your own objectivity?” Ellison got the conversation rolling with her own experience. As a little girl, she faced with a snack choice at a 7-11 convenience store, choosing a protein bar over candy—even though the caloric intake was (presumably) the same. Perhaps misunderstanding Ellison’s question, Gossett said that paying for school defined her objecthood, and Weinraub came to a similar realization when she “became a vaccinated citizen of the world.” (Her hippie parents apparently didn’t get her shots for mumps and scarlet fever.) Understanding the question way too literally, Dunham said she was born an object and argued that culture objectifies us. Fortunately, Sullivan played the game, describing how she intentionally dressed provocatively in her late teens to early twenties to make herself a sex object, for validation.

    The panelists’ responses set the tone for the next hour, with the four guests dodging Ellison’s seemingly random inquiries. “Are you earning enough, as a woman,” Ellison asked. Dunham replied, “Nobody actually asked me my gender identity,” and the host responded, “Can I explain? It doesn’t matter—do you know what I mean?” Weinraub was thankful for her access to resources; Sciortino mentioned something about making money peeing on submissive men. For a while Gossett tepidly criticized economic sexism and enforced gender binaries. It didn’t seem like the conversation was going anywhere until Sciortino cited studies revealing that physically attractive people—the hyper feminine and masculine kind—are perceived by many as better at doing their taxes, more honest, and able to get better rates on loans.

    Ellison segued into a segment called “Do You Trust This Face?” for which the panelists responded to images projected on the screen behind them. Weinraub compared a photograph of young Hillary Clinton with the female robot from the film Ex Machina and and riffed on artificial intelligence. While she looks forward to machine realizing a mind of its own, Ellison was skeptical and offered ways to fight malevolent machines: “You just unplug the thing,” she interjected. “They’re battery powered … then you don’t charge the battery.” Ellison then asked the panelists to rate their hotness on a scale of one to ten. While Dunham unsurprisingly resisted the notion of “setting yourself up for a system you don’t want to be in,” Gossett admitted to wanting to be told she looks good. Sciortino considered herself an 8.5 in Manhattan’s East Village, which she said translates to 9.5 in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Dunham eventually gave herself a zero—a number lower than the scale’s minimum—because she wanted to choose an extreme. Despite her nonparticipation, she brought up an excellent point: many individuals are less than desirable and invisible in culture, such as the disabled, people with AIDS, prisoners, homeless people, transgendered people, and other gender-nonconforming people. Weinraub likewise disagreed with Ellison’s game and awarded herself a zero; she got a high five from Dunham.

    Casey Jane Ellison asks the important questions

    The blonde, busty, and leggy Sciortino observed that appealing bodies are changing. During her high school years in the early 2000s, the “super pro ano” body type of Calista Flockhart, the Olsen twins, and Mischa Barton reigned. “You could see everyone’s backbone on the red carpet,” Sciortino commented. In pornography, though, she has observed a trend toward natural, flat-chested, confident women actors, identifying Sasha Grey, Stoya, and Tori Black as owners of slim bodies that aren’t blonde and busty, which contrasts the norm. Watching porn, Sciortino admitted, has helped her with own body image. “Things bounced around. I was like, that’s hot.” For Sciortino, the newest wave of feminism is defined by individuality. Since there are no more magazines to emulate, she said, women should be the best “you” they can be. Instead of appearing masculine intentionally, as feminists did in the 1970s, women are free to be whatever they want, including wearing “the sluttiest microdress you can find.” Sciortino joked: “No matter what we look like, someone wants to watch you have sex.”

    Agreeing with Sciortino’s views on porn, Gossett identified a “trans moment” in which fashion models appear in editorial spreads, though she noted that murder rates for this population are still high. Sciortino noted members of this group are sacrificing their privacy and safety to become accepted into mainstream culture, not unlike how gay men in the 1950s came out and were harassed, a move that slowly led toward their acceptance into straight society decades later. Dunham warned against outsiders assimilating into a culture that had previously rejected you. It was curious that no one mentioned the recent announcement of the former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner revealing himself as a woman, Caitlyn.

    “What is a whore?” Ellison inquired, but no one responded, so she moved onto a game called “There’s Suffering in That,” for which the panelists briefly responded to seemingly random photographs pulled from the internet. Everyone missed the crass American patriotism in an image of a woman’s hand, wrapped in red, white, and blue beads and holding up her index finger in a “We’re Number 1” way. Weinraub said the image made her happy, but I couldn’t help but picture a crowd of drunken bros at a sports bar chanting USA! USA! USA! The panelists somehow found suffering in two photos of cute dogs wearing sweaters. Weinraub experienced numbness and deep pain in a photo of a cake pop, but a seaside resort photo appealed to her “maximalist nature.”

    A family with fame and success: Carroll Dunham, Grace Dunham, Lena Dunham, and Laurie Simmons

    With time running out, Dunham read a short text that she and Gossett wrote together (read the transcript at Slutever). Being hot means having value, the statement began, which can be marketed, assessed, and branded. It can also reflect power and capital. Dunham acknowledged her privileges and advantages: being white, being relatively famous (her parents are artists Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, and her sister is Lena Dunham), possessing a vagina but having sex with women, and having power through association, via her relationship with black trans man. This relationship to power, fame, identity, and marginal authority, she said, makes her critique legitimate. “Those are the reasons why I’m hot,” she concluded. “That’s how hot I am.” The way Dunham reconciled contradictions of value and power without irony or haughtiness impressed me. But she dug deeper, saying that everyone longs for feelings of being known or being loved—which doesn’t necessarily mean being hot physically or aesthetically—and that compliments from the dominant system can make us feel good. An important distinction should be made, Dunham continued, between the self and the evaluated market value of the self. Further, fame can isolate people and push intimacy away, and a longing for fame can be harmful.

    Dunham said that people complain about art fairs and culture—“This fucking art fair,” she hilariously quipped—but at least at Frieze New York the financial aspects, the “economies of evaluation” in her words, are laid bare. (She declared that she was paid $500 for her panel appearance.) Art fairs, Dunham continued, allow people to fill the holes in their hearts, to reproduce the culture of evaluation, for better or worse. What is it about dealing art that makes you feel better or worth something,” she asked art dealers rhetorically. And of others: “Why am I valuable? Who do I want to be? How do I want to be loved?” After hearing this, I felt that we didn’t need Ellison’s faux talk show. Dunham could have read this piece onstage and left it at that.

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    Read

    Zoë Lescaze, “On Porn and Poodles: Casey Jane Ellison, Grace Dunham and Company Talk Sex, Gender, Art,” ARTnews, May 18, 2015.

    Listen

    http://friezeprojectsny.org/talks/aesthetics-of-female-attractiveness/

  • Not Just Another Ism

    Eroticism in Art
    Friday, January 24, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Eroticism, or rather explicit eroticism, was suddenly right out there in high-art country, courtesy in part of the new pluralism—and also of the women artist’s movement. It’s hard to say if Judith Bernstein’s hairy screws would seem erotic in the present day of Mapplethorpiana, but a major charge of the movement was explicit material from women. Joan Semmel, for instance, painted larger-than-life-size photo-realist couplings in phosphor colors. John Kacere’s close-up renderings of the buttocks of young women lying down in silky underpants and garters were, on the other hand, more what you might think of when you thought “erotic art.”

    Pat Passlof says the panel was “reticent.” Perhaps it was the topic. Or perhaps we hadn’t yet learned the spill-everything style of the ‘80s.

    Judith Bernstein, Five Panel Vertical, 1973, charcoal on paper, 150 x 60 in. each (artwork © Judith Bernstein)

    Moderator: Joan Semmel
    Panelists: John Kacere, Judith Bernstein, Bob Stanley, Charles Stark, and Louise Bourgeois

    Slides of everyone’s work and a film of Louise Bourgeois’s were projected on a wall with a provocatively placed protruding pipe.

    Joan Semmel began by citing Lucy Lippard: the more explicit the imagery, the less evocative the erotic work. Response from panelists was poor until John Kacere broke the ice with a meandering monologue on the mediocrity of porn: “If you’re very hungry, it doesn’t take much to turn you on.” Panelists were asked if their own work turned them on; Kacere again. “You can’t be horny for a month.” Panelists agreed that, in effect, their work was not really porn or even erotic—it just referred to a “beautiful human experience.”

    Joan Semmel, Hold, 1972, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 in. (artwork © Joan Semmel)

    Judith Bernstein said the political implications of her work are overlooked. Louise Bourgeois likes good-looking men who don’t know they are—a rarity, says she. Kacere dominated the evening with a series of wry ramblings on his unrequited youth. Semmel described men’s images of women as doll-like sexual objects. She prefers focusing on gestures that reveal the whole person. She told of a couple who found they could not live with her work. Unhappy with the thought of subject matter overwhelming painting, she resolved the issue with the idea that she had achieved the ultimate desire of every artist: disturbance of the viewer. (It has to be said here that the overpowering of the pictorial by subject matter constitutes a perfectly workable definition of pornography.) Semmel’s recent work, however, has taken a leaf from Lippard: less explicit imagery with a brilliant play on exaggerated foreshortenings which flatten surreal perspectives. “When my work changed from abstract to figurative, the emphasis shifted from the drama of paint to that of volume.”

    From the audience, Burt Hasen brought up the biomorphic nature of the species: “Men are women and women men.” Ignored as a drunk raving, Hasen was speaking well to the issue as others kept to popular theories of power role-playing. Semmel deserves credit for carrying a reticent panel virtually single-handed (except for the voluble Kacere).

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Pat Passlof, “Not Just Another Ism” was originally published in WIA Newsletter 2, no. 5 (February 1975); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 8. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • The Air That I Breathe

    This essay is the fourth of four that reviews “The Koons Effect,” a recent symposium at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Read the first, second, and third texts.

    Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late
    The Koons Effect Part 2
    Friday, September 12, 2014
    Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York

    Jeff Koons, one of four Art Magazine Ads, 1988–89, offset lithograph on Simpson Ragcote paper, 38 x 29¼ in. (artwork © Jeff Koons)

    Concluding the two-day symposium on the work of Jeff Koons was a keynote address by the art historian Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. By choosing a single decade—Crow’s talk was titled “Jeff Koons in the 1980s: Pop Culture Turns Up Late”—the scholar conveniently avoided discussing the artist’s work since the early 1990s, typically considered the divisive break between those who respect and loathe the artist, in particular when Koons exhibited his Made in Heaven series (1989–91). Indeed, in a review of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, one critic wrote, “Watching Koons between 1985 and 1992 was like being on a roller coaster, beholding the readymade crossed with greed, money, creepy beauty, and the ugliness of our culture.”1 Even the exhibition’s curator, Scott Rothkopf, skirted the later work in his catalogue essay “No Limits,” which analyzes Koons’s work up to Made in Heaven before defending the artist against the art market for the last half.2

    Crow’s delivery was slow, calm, assured, and never overbearing; his modest confidence was almost fatherly. He began his talk by discussing three artworks typically understood as “distant from Koons” but with “corresponding and congruent” ideas. Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–65), a sculpture comprising water inside a Plexiglas cube that responds to an exhibition’s environment, becoming “a living organism that reacts in a flexible manner to its surroundings.” Condensation Cube, Crow noted, can exist in the three chemical phases of matter—solid, liquid, and gas—depending on its physical conditions. Crow returned to the notion of phases, and to elements such as air and water, and also to conceptual, representational, and literal phases of imagery, several times during his talk.

    The second predecessor work was Andy Warhol and Billy Klüver’s Silver Clouds (1966), consisting of helium- and oxygen-filled balloons made from Mylar film, “a still very novel DuPont product,” Crow said, that was used by NASA for the first communication satellite, Echo 1, launched in 1960. The third work was unfinished: Gordon Matta-Clark’s made drawings for an airborne structure of his own; he even corresponded with the American businessman Gilmore Schjeldahl, the inventor of Mylar film and the creator of Echo 1, circa 1977, during his research. Matta-Clark’s project was concurrent with Koons’s earliest works, The Inflatables (1978–79). “These two projects,” Crow said, “while coincidental in time, manifest vastly different scales of endeavor and intended effects on their audiences.” Unlike Matta-Clark, Koons avoided engineering problems by purchasing his materials—mirrored squares and plastic toys—off the shelf.

    Thomas Crow speaks right on time (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Moving to Koons’s series The New (ca. 1980–83), for which Koons entombed out-of-the-box vacuum cleaners in upright Plexiglas coffins, Crow asked, “Why choose vacuums in the first place?” While many would offer “commodity fetishism” as an answer, he argued that these machines signify “tiresome, disagreeable, and never-ending work.” With a design basically unchanged since World War II, Crow said, vacuum cleaners are simply not seductive. When the machine’s power is switched on and off, its bag inflates and deflates, just like a pair of lungs. “The mental enterprise of reconciling the fantasy of immortality—being forever new—with the fragility of actual life is not something that Jeff Koons invented,” he explained. “To the massive contrary, it comes close to a core definition of the whole symbolic dimension of human culture.” For Crow, Koons’s work is about mobility and stasis and the contradiction between the mortality of humanity and the idea of perfection that people over the centuries have attributed to gods and demigods. “Needing a tool,” Crow remarked, “doesn’t make you a commodity fetishist.”

    Crow argued that Koons’s populist touch surfaced in the three distinct bodies of work in the Equilibrium series (1985), which included the cast bronzes of the inflatable lifeboat and snorkel, the floating basketballs in glass tanks, and the appropriated Nike posters. The bronze works are hollow—the air is trapped inside. The poster of Darrell Griffith (a.k.a. Dr. Dunkenstein) featured dry ice (a carbon dioxide that skips the liquid phase) rising from bisected basketballs, and the poster of Moses Malone boasted a dry seabed. Crow noted the racial tension inherent/embedded in professional basketball, in which white fans deify the unfathomably natural talent of black players. These revelations arrived relatively late in the artist’s career, the scholar said, but he seized them. The posters in particular, Crow stated, “must have confirmed the artist even more deeply in his sense of the rightness of his sculptural intuitions.”

    Thomas Hoepker, 1989. Jeff Koons with collection of his sculptures in New York, 1989, archival pigment print, 18 x 24 in. (photograph © Thomas Hoepker)

    Crow briefly discussed works from the Luxury and Degradation series (1986), which showcased “anonymous drinking artifacts” used in “suburban Bacchic rites,” and from Banality (1988), for which vernacular and religious images were enlarged to ridiculous proportions using the means of Old World craft. Entering the 1990s, the critical tide, which had been on Koons’s side until then, turned against him. It was acceptable, art historically speaking, for Koons to employ bronze casting and fabricate Minimalesque cases Koons used for The New and Equilibrium. But, it seems, the pornography of Made in Heaven was rejected. In 1994, Koons turned to air and matter again in the Celebration series (1994–2014), whose works featured thin, liquid membranes such as balloons. Unlike a heat-sealed plastic rabbit, a balloon is expansive, and its surface becomes thinner when blown with more air

    From the audience, the artist Josiah McElheny asked Crow how today’s Koons squares against 1980s Koons. During a Flash Art panel in 1986, Crow replied, Koons was a twentysomething artist who wanted to be taken seriously at the time.3 Is that just as much an act, McElheny wanted to know, as the self-help affirmation guy that Koons has become? During the symposium, McElheny noted, panelists perceived the fun in Koons’s act as a portal into dark, uncomfortable places—and, like many other thinkers, one should not take Koons’s words at face value. “He’s speaking through his art in a way that’s quite transparent,” argued Crow, “and that goes against the grain of the things he generally says.” Topics such as the quest, danger, and allegory, as well as supernatural personification, were historically the domain of fine art, Crow said, but have since been suppressed in modern times. Now we find these ideas in astrology columns and young-adult fiction. Echoing the artist Carol Bove’s position from last night’s panel, Crow wondered aloud, “Where myth has gone to live now that we don’t feel we believe in this anymore?”

    Buster Keaton on Palm Sunday (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Another audience member asked, “Where is Mike Kelley in this?” After a moment of flabbergast at the momentous nature of the question, Crow responded, “Kelley is honest. He’s always honest.” Kelley and his admirers, the scholar continued, share an intellectual ambition and an educational influence, as well as a desire for mythic, emotional expressions but not in a high-minded way. According to Crow, Kelley “had to debase to get to affirmation.” The artist Stephen Prina recalled that Kelley worried about the psychoanalytical aspect of stuffed animals: because people understood these objects to reference the artist’s own past, Kelley became scientific and conceptual about their display, putting them on tables like specimens. Prina concluded the digression: “I’ve only become worried about infantilism as an adult.”

    In Terms Of count: 7.

    1 Jerry Saltz, “Taking in Jeff Koons, Creator and Destroyer of Worlds,” New York, June 25, 2014.

    2 Scott Rothkopf, “No Limits,” Jeff Koons: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2014), 15–35.

    3 The panel discussion was moderated by Peter Nagy and comprised Jeff Koons, Haim Steinbach, Sherrie Levine, Philip Taaffe, Peter Halley, and Ashley Bickerton. See David Robbins, ed., “From Criticism to Complicity,” Flash Art 129 (Summer 1986): 46–49.

    Read

    Elizabeth Buhe, “Blowing Up the Koons Effect,” IFA Contemporary, September 25, 2014.

    Watch